The Strength and Failure of Glass in Bending

Fred Veer, J. Zuidema & F.P.Bos Delft University of Technology

The strength of glass as used in architectural engineering is one of those things about which too little is known. To determine what would be a safe design stress for glass in a completely glass structure, tests have been done on panels of annealed float glass and fully tempered glass using different sizes and both lying and standing positions. The results demonstrate that the strength of both annealed and tempered glass is dependent on the orientation of loading, the commonly held strength values for tempered glass are a gross over estimate for beams under bending loading, the strength data cannot be described by Weibull statistics.

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The Authors

	Dr. Frederic Veer Dr. Delft University of Technology Frederic Veer has been involved in glass research since 1995, developing new combinations and structures which use glass as a structural material in innovative ways. Currently the author is head of a ... Read more
	Mr. Freek Bos ir. Delft University of Technology Freek Bos works as a Ph.D. researcher at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture, where he graduated in 2002 (specializing in both Building Technology and Architecture) on form-finding as a design tool f... Read more