The Glass Dome

Lucio Blandini, University of Stuttgart

A prototype of a frameless structural glass shell has been designed and built in order to demonstrate the structural efficiency as well as the aesthetical quality to be achieved by combining glass as structural material with adhesives as joining system.

All the materials are reduced to a minimum. The shell spans 8.5 m and is assembled by gluing only 10 mm thick spherical glass panes at the edges: yet, the lamination of 8 mm float with only 2 mm thick chemically-strengthened glass panes allows a considerable reduction of the dead loads. Moreover, the tensile ring supporting the shell has been designed in titanium to avoid restraint stresses as a result of temperature variations, thus allowing for a slender stainless steel supporting system.
The adhesive technology, developed by the authors, allows for the up-to-10 mm gaps between the panes to be filled, thus allowing the forces to be transmitted and the tolerances to be adjusted. In order to demonstrate the validity of such a joining system, tensile, shear and bending tests have been carried out under different temperatures and loading times.

Several glazed shells have been built in the last two decades, with the goal of minimizing the use and the size of metallic elements. The introduction of glass as a structural material as well as the use of adhesives allows, for the first time, a fully transparent double-curved skin, thereby opening new dimensions to shell design.

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The Authors

Mr. Lucio Blandini Project Manager Werner Sobek Stuttgart Lucio Blandini is working toward completing a PhD degree at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. The research is supervised by Prof. Werner Sobek and focuses on “Structural Use of Adhesives in Glass ... Read more