Composite glass sandwich panels, consisting of glass face sheets bonded to linear stiffeners (spines) in the core region, can provide significant benefits in material efficiency, reduced thickness, and greater overall transparency. However, current analytical models of their mechanical performance fail to account for the non-uniform longitudinal stress distribution caused by shear-lag effects in wide structural panels. This study redresses this by means of experimental research on composite glazing panels with different loading and geometrical configurations. Six 4-point bending experiments were performed on 34 mm thick, 1000 mm long, and 700 mm wide composite glazing panels, made from soda-lime silica glass face sheets bonded to glass fibre-reinforced polymer core spines. Two types of adhesives were tested: a relatively low stiffness silicone-based adhesive, and a relatively high stiffness epoxy-based adhesive. The shear-lag effects are quantified in terms of effective width ratios (EWR). The study showed that the epoxy-bonded panels provided a significant degree of composite action (DCA = 0.85) whereas the composite action in the silicone-bonded panels was negligible. Furthermore, it was found that applying the EWR values from this study in a recently published analytical model yields predictions of maximum strains at mid-span that deviate by no more than 16 % from the experimental results.

Neglecting the accidental soccer or golf ball hitting the window of the neighbors in a movie, actual impact on glass is rare. In architecture, the only significant case in the literature is where a fully tempered laminated panel of the New York Apple cube was hit by a small stone launched by a snow blower. Nowadays a lot of glass is used in sound screens next to high ways. These are however subjected to regular impact of small, fast-moving hard bodies. Mostly small stones which are removed from the asphalt road surface due to wear and are launched by car tires. This is a regular occurrence leading to safety questions and also to considerable cost as replacing the sound screen panels not only costs money but also requires closing down at least the outer lane of the highway, thus reducing the traffic flow. Thus a study was made of the impact resistance of annealed, heat-strengthened, and fully tempered laminated glass using test panels. This was followed by the testing of a full-size sound screen panel. The results show that the impact resistance of tempered glass is determined by the amount of compressive surface pre-stress. However, it is also noted that although fully tempered glass better resists impact, it has no residual strength after an impact with the critical energy.

This paper extends polyhedral Airy stress functions to incorporate body forces. Stresses of an equilibrium state of a 2D structure can be represented by the sec- ond derivatives of a smooth Airy stress function and the integrals of body forces. In the absence of body forces, a smooth Airy stress function can be discretised into a polyhedron as the corresponding structure is discretised into a truss. The differ- ence in slope across a creases represents the axial force on the bar, while the zero curvatures of the planar faces represent zero stresses voids of the structure. When body forces are present, the zero-stress condition requires the discretised Airy stress function to curve with the integrals of these body forces. Meanwhile, the isotropic angles on the creases still indicate concentrated axial forces. This paper discretises the integrals of body forces into step-wise functions, and discretises the Airy stress function into quadric faces connected by curved creases. The proposed method could provide structural designers (e.g. architects, structural engineers) with a more intuitive way to perceive stress fields.