Enabling a Ductile Failure of Laminated Glass Beams with Iron‐Based Shape Memory Alloy (Fe‐SMA) Strips
Vlad Alexandru Silvestru, Zhikang Deng, Julien Michels, Andreas Taras
Abstract
Abstract Laminated glass beams are used as structural elements to support transparent roofs or to transfer wind loads acting on transparent facades. However, in case of breakage, laminated glass beams only exhibit a low residual load‐carrying capacity provided by the interlayers. A more efficient solution is to add a filigree ductile reinforcement on the tension side of the laminated glass beams, for instance by adhesive bonding. By these means, the post‐cracking behaviour of the beams and their redundancy can be improved and a ductile failure behaviour can be achieved. Moreover, an additional pre‐stressing of this reinforcement allows increasing the initial glass cracking resistance. Despite their obvious potential, an application of pre‐stressed laminated glass beams in real projects is prevented by the rather complicated necessary procedures for pre‐stressing. This contribution discusses first experimental results on a novel concept for pre‐stressed laminated glass beams with adhesively bonded strips made of an iron‐based shape memory alloy (Fe‐SMA). The pre‐stress can be applied in this case by heating up the Fe‐SMA. The feasibility of the concept is analysed based on results from four‐point‐bending tests on medium‐scale simple, reinforced and pre‐stressed laminated glass beams.