Experimental and numerical investigations on glass fragments: shear-frame testing and calibration of Mohr–Coulomb plasticity model

The numerical treatment of the residual load-bearing behavior of laminated glasses (LG) in the post-fractured state is highly topical. Nevertheless, currently only few numerical approaches for an accurate representation of the experimentally observed behavior are existent. In order to model the characteristics of the load-bearing behavior of glass laminates in the post-fractured state, the behavior of the interlayer, the behavior of the glass fragments as well as the bonding between glass and interlayer need to be characterized correctly. This paper focuses on the modeling of the frictional contacts between the glass fragments itself. In order to allow for the calibration of failure criteria for the fractured glass particles, framed shear tests which are a common experimental technique in geomechanical testing to determine the shear strength of soils, are performed on glass fragments of different thicknesses and levels of thermal pre-stress. The test results are subsequently used to calibrate non-associated Mohr–Coulomb criteria, which are widely applied to the description of failure and frictional sliding of soils, to the experimental data of four distinct kinds of glass fragments. The obtained parameters of the Mohr–Coulomb models are in magnitude similar to the parameters of standard soils such as sand or gravel. The experimental data further show, that the Mohr–Coulomb model in general can be used to approximate the stress failure plane of the glass fragments but lacks for capturing correctly the plastic volumetric strains (dilation) in Finite Element modelling. Numerical investigations by the Finite Element method showed, that it is possible to reproduce experimental data by using Mohr–Coulomb plasticity models and hence the numerical models are validated for further investigations.