Influence of panels size on the static and dynamic performance of laminated glass panels

Laminated glass is made by joining two or more glass layers together using a polymeric interlayer which can significantly minimize the risk of flying shards and dissipate a great deal of energy after the glass cracking stage. In this paper, tensile tests are conducted on three different polymeric films i.e., PVB, EVA, and SentryGlas (SG) at two different strain rates to characterize the mechanical properties of the interlayer. In addition, a static full-scale water chamber was used to study the effect of panel size on the characteristic failure and deflection of the laminated glass windows experimentally. However, due to the high risk and cost of explosion experiments, dynamic modeling of laminated glass window systems is presented in this paper using ANSYS AUTODYN. The accuracy of the dynamic model is verified with previously published experimental data. Material characterization tests showed that SG film has the highest strength, which appeared significantly also in the static panel test and numerical. In addition, the maximum reduction in panel static strength due to size increase was observed in panels with SG and PVB interlayers with a maximum reduction of 58%. However, SG showed a lower dynamic response under blast loads.