Description
In the last few decades, contemporary architecture has been pushing the use of structural glass in many applications. Thus, the glass industry has developed the thermal toughening to increase its tensile strength and lamination to prevent brittle failures. However, additional structural redundancy is required, since glass elements can still fail unexpectedly due to the growth of existing surface flaws. To overcome these issues, several solutions have been proposed based on glass composite systems, mainly using steel, fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP) or iron-based shape memory alloy (Fe-SMA), as reinforcement.
This work presents innovative hybrid CFRP composite and Fe-SMA bonded systems for structural glass flexural strengthening. These innovative systems consist of laminated glass beams simultaneously strengthened with near-surface mounted (NSM) and externally bonded reinforced (EBR) with CFRP composite and Fe-SMA reinforcements. The ability of such systems to (i) avoid premature debonding, (ii) improve post-cracking response and (iii) ensure ductile failure modes was assessed through flexural tests on large-scale laminated glass beams, where the effect of post-tensioning was also explored.