Glued and preloaded bolted connections for laminated float glass

ir.-arch. Dieter Callewaert, dr. ir.-arch. Jan Belis, prof. dr. ir. Rudy Van Impe, prof. dr. ir. Guy Lagae and ir. Matthieu De Beule, Ghent University, Laboratory for Research on Structural Models, Department of Structural Engineering

Bolted connections are probably the most commonly used assembling devices for glass structures. It is general practice to use bolted connections only in combination with tempered glass, which shows a relatively good resistance to stress concentrations. Increased production time and costs are the major drawbacks caused by the use of tempered glass. Due to the high local stresses caused by common bolted connections, annealed float glass is usually not used.

In order to fill up this gap and to exclude the drawbacks mentioned above, a bolted connection for float glass was designed and tested. To reach a good strength transfer between the bolt and the laminated float glass, a preloaded bolt proved to be inevitable. To maintain the preload, the interlayer needed to be replaced locally by aluminium. To increase the failure load, the aluminium inserts were glued on the glass.

During the design process, the influence of different parameters (e.g. the cross-section of the aluminium inserts and the diameter of the drilled hole and the bolt) was tested experimentally. The test program showed that with a judicious choice of the design parameters, the failure load could be multiplied with a factor three compared to a fitting bolted connection.

Full text article [310 KB]

The Authors

Mr. Dieter Callewaert ir.-arch. UGent Dieter Callewaert is a civil engineer-architect. He graduated in 2006 at Ghent University in Belgium. In september 2006 he started as a PhD researcher at the Laboratory for Research on structural Mode... Read more