Standards To Measure Architectural Glass Strength And Study Of Post-breakage Strength Of Laminated Glass

With the continuing development of human’s requirment for the building aesthetics, glass is gaining growing uses in the building construction. Its excellent transparency properties meet the visual demand of the public for the building envelope. The safety characteristics must be taken into consideration in the process of design. In recent years, the casualties and property losses due to glass breakage are often seen, so the sudden breakage of glass may tend to cause dange to people and presents a huge challenge for strutural engineers. This thesis aims to study the method of measuring the strength of glass and intend to solve the problem of the sudden breakage of glass structures, which can lead to a guide to glass engineering design.A variety of test standards to measure the strength of glass from different countries are briefly documented, including American standard ASTM, British standard BSEN, Russian standard and China standard. The comparison of glass surface strength and edge strength from different standards are presents in terms of the requirments of test specimens and loading environments, and so on.The studies of post-breakage strength of laminated glass are briefly reviewed from the perspective of being subjected to both in-plane and out-of-plane actions. A new theoritical model incorporating three stage model and yield line method to predict the post-breakage strength of laminated glass are proposed. This method has a clear physical meaning and simple caculating process, which can be uesd in different support conditions and different geometrical size of glass. The model is well compared with the experimental results. Based on this model, the effects of glass thickness, interlayer thickness, glass span, support conditions and interlyer material on the post-breakage strength of laminated glass are analysed. Post breakage strengths of triangle, rectangle and hesagonal laminated glass are caculated and the post breakage strength of different polygonal laminated glass are also analysed.The commercial software ABAQUS and the built-in cohesive element are used to simulate the cohesive characteristics between glass and interlayer. The effects of normal and tangential stiffness, initial breakage strength and the failure energy on the cohesive characteristic between glass and interlayer of laminated glass are analysed.