Effective Laminate Thickness for the Design of Laminated Glass

Dr. Ignatius Calderone, Calderone and Associates Pty Ltd
Mr. Phillip S. Davies & Dr. Stephen J. Bennison, E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co Inc.
Professor Huang Xiaokun & Mr. Liu Gang, China Academy of Building Research (CABR)

In the design of laminated glass to meet various structural loads, engineers generally make simplifying assumptions or make reference to procedures given in various standards. The current Australian standard, AS1288, which was published in 2006, allows the total glass thickness to be used for shortterm load duration but for medium or long-term load durations it gives relationships for load sharing factors for the glass components. However, these methods may not give correct results and the Australian standard alternatively allows a full non-linear analysis, modelling the glass-interlayer sheets behaviour, to be undertaken. Since such an analysis is not readily available to all designers, a Working Group was formed in Australia in order to determine if a procedure using the effective thickness of the laminated glass could be adopted for the design of laminated glass. This paper presents the results of the investigation carried out by the authors for the purpose of assisting the Working Group in adopting revised design procedures for use in the Australian Standard. The investigation includes a review of data from test programs in which the laminate effective thickness has been measured directly and compared to simplified calculation methods based on the effective thickness approach. Additionally, finite element methods are compared to an effective thickness approach to calculating laminated glass structural behaviour.

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The Authors

	Dr. Ignatius Calderone Director Calderone and Associates Pty Ltd Dr Ignatius Calderone is a Director of Calderone and Associates Pty Ltd, Consulting Engineers based in Melbourne Australia. His expertise is in the areas of building façade design particularly with re... Read more
	Mr. Phillip Davies Director Davies Laminated Glass Consulting Pty Ltd Phillip Davies has been involved with the laminated glass industry for DuPont for the past 22 years and has extensive experience in all facets of architectural laminated glass from manufacturing throu... Read more
	Dr. Stephen Bennison Research Associate E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. Inc. Steve Bennison works on programs related to the development of polymer interlayers for laminated glass. Since 2001 he has been working for DuPont’s Glass Laminated Products business unit as a Researc... Read more
	Dr. Liu Gang Instructor ShanDong University of Technology Read more