Numerical Analysis of TGU Windows Under Blast – GLASS-SHARD Outlook

Abstract

The analysis of load-bearing capacity and the determination of blast protection levels for ordinary glass windows and façade components in buildings is known to represent a design and research issue of crucial importance. In the same way, reliable methods to address this issue are mostly based on cost and management expensive experimental investigations on full-size samples. According to the tendency of recent years, this paper presents some of major outcomes of Finite Element (FE) numerical methods and simulations that have been explored in the framework of the GLASS-SHARD research project for glass windows and facades under explosion or soft-body impact. The attention is focused on the analysis of a Triple Glass Unit (TGU), so as to address the blast performance of a rather ordinary glass window for buildings characterized by the presence of multiple laminated glass (LG) layers, on one side, and by the presence of two interposed gas cavities. The TGU blast performance is investigated in terms of load-bearing capacity of single components, with respect to variations in the input blast loads (stand-off distance R, charge W, etc).

A Comparative Study on the Optimal Modeling of Laminated Glass

“…Composition results for soda-lime annealed glass are provided in Table 2. Various models were collected and tested for the annealed glass from the literature, including the straightforward brittle elastic model with a brittle cracking limit associated with the 70-100 MPa strength limit, up to the advanced damage initiation and propagation models by Johnson-Holmquist for ceramics, the model developed by Bedon et al (2022) [54], the model developed by Hidallana-Gamage et al [39] and others [55,56]. The simple brittle cracking model offered satisfactory results at 47% less computational cost compared to the implementation of damage propagation models.…”