Point-supported Glass Analytic Solution And A Point-supported Glass Curtain Wall Coupled Dynamic Analysis

Point-supported glass curtain wall, applied in engineering recently, is a new style of architecture and developing quickly. With self characters in design, manufacture and installment of glass plate, metal connector and supporting structure, its supporting conditions is very different from traditional curtain wall. Point-supported glass curtain wall is a new type of structure, the analysis of which is a new research subject. The main point of the paper is just to form a set of complete, systematic and scientific theory of structural for practical construction and deduce a corresponding method of structural analysis. Different from the traditional boundary condition, that of point-supported glass plate is quite complicated and is very difficult to be satisfied completely. A new method to predict the bending behavior of rectangular plates supported at four or six point and subjected to arbitrarily distributed load is presented in this paper. The boundary conditions are fully satisfied by the proposed displacement function. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution, the analytical results are compared with those obtained by Lee and Ballesteros[1],C.M.Wang[4] and Galerkin[5]. The convergent speed of the method is quickly and the precision could meet engineering demand. Though many studies involve in the dynamical responses of glass curtain wall, there is yet no consistent results on the effect of coupling mechanism on the dynamical responses of the system. In this paper, the governing differential equations of dynamical responses of coupled glazing systems are proposed. Based on the above equations, a series of time history calculations are carried out for the earthquake response analysis of point-supported glass curtain wall. The effect of coupling mechanism on the dynamical responses of the system is studied. The main parameters and characteristic for the earthquake response of curtain wall are found. The results of the analysis show that the items of earthquake loading in the current criterion are not reliable in some cases and the mutual work of load-bearing structure and curtain wall must be involved. A reasonable method taking account of the effect of coupling mechanism on the dynamical responses of the system is put forward, and the values of earthquake load on curtain wall are suggested. In the end, the analysis of point-supported glass curtain wall system of Hangzhou theater is given as example. With wide application of glass curtain-wall structures to engineering projects, to establish a set of basic theories and methods of structural analysis for glass curtain-wall is a problem which needs to be solved urgently. And yet there haven't been enough reference information tracked down. The theory and analytic method still leave a lot of work to do.