Trabes Vitreae Tensegrity: an Example of Segmental Prestressed Glass Beams

Maurizio Froli, Leonardo Lani

High transparency and modularity, retarded first cracking, non brittle collapse and fail-safe design were the basic requirements that inspired and guided the development of a new kind of glass beams. The two basic conceptual design goals were to avoid any cracking at service and to get a ductile behavior at failure. These objectives were reached by anticipating and directing cracks with the subdivision of the beam into many small triangular laminated panes and by assembling them together by means of prestressed steel cables. Two prototypes have been constructed at the University of Pisa, tested in the elastic domain under dynamics loads and successively brought to collapse under quasi static, increasing load cycles. In order to investigate the decay process of residual mechanical resources, the second prototype has been repaired two times by substituting just the damaged triangular panes and then tested again each time up to failure. Non linear numerical simulations, performed by appropriate FEM modeling, resulted satisfactory able to predict and reproduce experimental results.

Full text article [1,328 KB]

The Authors

	Mr. Maurizio Froli Prof. Dipartimento di Ingegneria Struttunle 1980 Civil Engineering degree "magna cum laude", University of Pisa. 1982 Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Engineering in Pisa, section "Steel and Reinforced Concrete Constructions". 1990 exper... Read more
	Dr. Leonardo Lani Engineer University of Pisa Leonardo Lani, born 1971, received his civil engineering degree from Univ. of Florence in 2001, and his PhD degree from the Univ. of Pisa in 2006. He is presently Research Contractor. Read more