This was the joint second place winning presentation from the Young Researchers Conference 2020.
Laminated glass panels are increasingly used to improve the blast resilience of glazed facades, as part of efforts to mitigate the threat posed to buildings and their occupants by terrorist attacks. These usually consist of two layers of annealed glass with a polyvinyl butyral polymer interlayer.
Such panels fail in a more ductile manner than glass alone, and retain glass fragments following fracture. This reduces glass-related injuries in blast events.
The blast response of these ductile panels is still only partially understood, with an evident knowledge gap between fundamental behaviour at the material level and observations from full-scale blast tests.
To enhance our understanding of the structural response, and help bridge this gap, this research adopts a ‘first principles’ approach to investigate the effects of:
- High strain-rate, associated with short-duration blast loading
- In-plane restraint, offered by blast-resistant frames
- Inertia loading, under the accelerations experienced by a panel during a typical blast event
Blast resilience of glazed facades