Numerical representation of fracture patterns and post-fracture load-bearing performance of thermally prestressed glass with polymer foil

• Published in: Engineering structures Vol. 226; p. 111318
• Main Authors: Saputra, A., Behnke, R., Xing, W., Song, C., Schneider, J., Kaliske, M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2021; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Bending; Civil engineering; Cohesive elements; Digital image processing; Digital imaging; Foils; Glass; Image processing; Interlayers; Load resistance; Polymers; Post-fracture load-bearing performance; Prismatic polyhedral finite elements; Residual stress; Safety glass; Separation; Structural integrity; Tensile strength; Cohesive elements; Prismatic polyhedral finite elements; Post-fracture load-bearing performance; Glass; Digital image processing
• ISSN: 0141-0296; 1873-7323
• DOI: 10.1016/j.engstruct.2020.111318

•A thermally prestressed glass panel with a polymer foil (backsheet) is studied.•Its post-fracture load-bearing performance (bending) is numerically assessed.•Digital image processing is used to obtain fracture patterns from experiments.•The panel is modeled by a quadtree mesh with prismatic polyhedral finite elements.•Cohesive elements represent the structural effect of the polymer foil. Glass can be thermally prestressed to enhance its load-bearing performance and tensile strength for civil engineering constructions. In such applications, the glass is thermally treated (internal stress state) and polymer foils/interlayers are applied to generate a laminate with a higher resistance to bending (out-of-plane loading) in case of fracture. In this contribution, a thermally prestressed glass panel with polymer foil as a backsheet is investigated as a special configuration of safety glass. In its post-fracture state, the polymer foil still provides a minimum structural integrity. Commonly, the post-fracture load-bearing performance of such polymer-glass assemblies is experimentally assessed by large scale tests related to high costs and testing time. In this research, an approach is presented to numerically assess the post-fracture load-bearing performance (bending) of such a fractured glass panel. The approach is based on A) digital image processing of the fracture pattern of three glass samples, B) the generation of a quadtree finite element (FE) mesh, C) the use of prismatic polyhedral FE to efficiently represent glass fragments in the quadtree FE mesh and D) cohesive elements with a nonlinear traction-separation law (TSL) for finite separation to represent the structural effect of the polymer foil during the post-fracture state.