Glass-metal and glass-GFRP elements with composite structural behaviour
Glass enjoys an increasing popularity as a building material during recent years. Ambitious architectural designs, technological progress and innovative research results substantiate this fact. However, when glass elements receive a structural role, the brittleness of the material requires for careful design considerations. In order to achieve an enhanced structural capacity, a more ductile failure behaviour as well as an increased redundancy, the combination of glass with other materials to obtain elements with composite structural behaviour is a suitable solution. Such elements can be realized both for panels, as the one shown in the figure below, and for beams.
In our group, we investigate the feasibility and the structural behaviour of novel glass-metal and glass-GFRP elements with composite structural behaviour for the use in transparent facades. This research extends the findings obtained by Vlad Silvestru in his PhD thesis completed at Graz University of Technology in 2018. We focus among others on the application of novel materials like shape memory alloys, the characterisation and modelling of suitable adhesives and the development of FEM-based design approaches. The applied methodology includes standardized and non-standardized experimental testing at material, connection and element level, non-linear finite element simulations and statistical evaluation of obtained data. The aim of the research is to provide a background for the development of novel innovative structural elements as well as corresponding suitable state-of-the-art design approaches.