Post-fracture behavior of laminated plates after human impact test

For safety barriers the load bearing capacity of the glass when subjected to the soft body impact should be verified. The soft body pendulum test became a testing standard to classify safety glass plates. The classification of the safety glass do not consider the structural behavior when one sheet of a laminated glass is broken; in situations when the replacement of the plate could not be very urgent, structural behavior should be evaluated. The main objective of this paper is to present the structural behavior o laminated glass plates, though modal test and human impact test, including the post fracture behavior for the laminated cases. A god reproducibility and repeatability is obtained. Two main aspects of the structural behavior can be observed: the increment of the rupture load for laminated plates after the failure of the first sheet, and some similarities with a tempered monolithic behavior of equivalent thickness.

Evaluation of damping properties of structural glass panes under impact loading

The latest technology and architectural trends have significantly improved the use of a large variety of glass products in construction which, in function of their own characteristocs, allow to design and calculate structural glass elements under safety conditions. This paper presents the evaluation and analysis of the damping properties of rectangular laminated glass plates of 1.938 m x 0.876 m with different thickness depending on the number of PVB interlayers arranged. By means of numerical simulation and experimental verification, using modal analysis, natural frequencies and damping of the glass plates were calculated, both under free boundary conditions and operational conditions for the impact test equipment used in the experimental program, as the European standard UNE-EN 12600:2003 specifies.