Flexible, Consistent and Safe Design of Structural Glass Elements

Matthias Haldimann, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

The ongoing research work whereof a part is presented in this paper aims at making glass design more consistent and transparent as well as at extending current design concepts to allow for the safe design of structural glass elements of any geometry and any type of load, including structural stability problems. The paper is dedicated to a method for flexible and consistent quantitative modelling of the reliability of structural glass elements. Cases where resistance is governed by one or a few large flaws and cases where it is governed by many random surface flaws can be considered alike. The concept is entirely based on fracture mechanics and statistics. It allows to make results of various test procedures comparable and to use them for design, to directly calculate the failure probability of glass elements under any conditions, to calibrate simplified design concepts and to correctly interpret results of experiments with complex stress distributions like those dealing with structural stability or glass connections. The approach avoids assumptions or simplifications that would limit its applicability or cause inconsistencies and is therefore applicable to most general conditions, including non-uniformly distributed loads and in-plane loads. The parameters are independent of the test conditions, do not mix up different aspects of the material behaviour and have an understandable physical meaning.

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The Authors

Dr. Matthias Haldimann Chief of Staff Emch+Berger AG Bern - Engineering and Consulting Matthias Haldimann is Research Engineer and Doctoral Candidate at the Steel Structures Laboratory (ICOM) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He has been working on composite ... Read more