Slim Skins

Slim Skins: Building a new glazed facade system

Foolen de Oliveira, Barbara (TU Delft Architecture and the Built Environment; TU Delft Architectural Engineering +Technology)

Overend, M. (mentor)
Bergsma, A.C. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences

2022-01-14

Glass has been around for four thousand years and its demand to be used in facades has been increasing ever since. The appeal of a glazed facade is the transparency factor which can connect inside and outside environments without losing the protection a facade provides against the elements. Nowadays the glazed facades that have high transparency tend to be inefficient due to it being time-consuming to design, as it needs a lot of customization, and to produce and assemble on site. Other glazed options deal with the same issues, however, they do not provide the same amount of transparency. To address this gap in the market, this research will look into possibilities to achieve higher transparency in a unitized facade system. The first thing to establish in this research is the requirements with which the facade panel must comply. These can be arranged into five categories, transparency, unitized system, maintenance, sustainability, and design for practice, which includes structure, movement, tolerances, safety, thermal, and water- and air-tightness. Next, a provisional detail was created by using two projects as inspiration for its structural concept as they were examples of a two-sided support system and of how to use composite action to achieve a slimmer profile. With this detail, a reliable structural finite element model could be built to facilitate further analyses. The last steps of this research focused on investigative design. This uses variations of the provisional detail design to get an understanding of what aspects influence each other and how each performance compares against the set requirements. From these analyses, it was concluded that to achieve a highly transparent, unitized facade system the composite action between the glass panels and the mullion is crucial. Furthermore, having the mullion sandwiched between the glass not only provides a better composite action but is also the visually most pleasing option as it has little variety of materials shown on the surface. Even though the final design settled on, is considered the best option in this study, it nevertheless has some challenges. One of these challenges is the use of adhesives, as it can have a negative effect on the sustainability aspect regarding the endof- life. Another complication can appear when looking at the proportions between the glass panels and the mullion. The mullion is quite small compared to the glass and thus making it an intricate process when assembling.

Facade Design
Composite action
Sustainability

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1df27396-664d-4646-9509-38e7973c890a

Student theses

master thesis

© 2022 Barbara Foolen de Oliveira