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Glass used as walls 2

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lampi2k

Structural
Aug 7, 2014
7
since most clients choose glass walls to be installed for residential house, what are the remedies (structural design) to resist lateral forces?
 
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Moment resisting frames, or cantilevered columns. Or else, talk the client or architect out of some of the glassed area so as to provide some shear walls. Or provide cross bracing across the glass, a solution which some like and some don't.
 
You can also utilize interior shear walls to take the place of the glass walls laterally. Thee sided shear wall systems are an option too, albeit a contentious one. For both schemes it is prudent to keep an eye on the drift at the glass wall.

The greatest trick that bond stress ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist.
 
Impressive picture glass, got any details on that sort of system? What provides the lateral resistance for the structure?

Maine EIT, Civil/Structural.
 
It may well be the glass that resists the shear loads. With appropriate attention to reliability, that kind of thing is very much on the table nowadays.

The greatest trick that bond stress ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist.
 
No kootk, no it is not... If your material is wholly brittle, you should very much NOT be using it as a cyclical loading resistance system. Not at all reasonable, IMHO.

Glass: Very impressive... Is this a non-EQ zone? Otherwise how did you address post-EQ reliability?
 
A few points:
- glass is infinitely strong in compression
- structural silicone between panels makes the panels work together in plane as a pretty effective shear wall
- there was another concrete shear wall out of the shot.
- project was in Santa FE, NM
- it was laminated glass and had other layers of redundancy built into the concept.

See attached for another glass wall building, actually with a glass beams and a glass roof also. We completed in Times Square NYC in 2008.
 
 http://files.engineering.com/getfile.aspx?folder=c2a33410-30ff-43c0-b1c0-7882a97d1889&file=TKTS_15120_Ext_Booth_Windows_MR.jpg
Glorious Glass99. Are you familiar with the work of John Kooymans? I got to peer review some of his work back when we shared an employer. That's how I came to be a believer in glass as a serious structural material.

I firmly believe that structural reliability methods properly applied to brittle materials can produce structures with the same level of safety that can be had in ductile construction. It takes more skill but, then, we've got the technology.

Post-Christchurch, some are even starting to question if ductility is really even all that great. Preventing collapse is nifty but having to demo half your building stock is not. This manner of thinking is consistent with performance based design principles. Any material can be put to work so long as its limitations are respected.

I'm currently reading a book called "the stone skeleton". It's about the structural design of brittle,unreinforced, mortarless masonry and stone. Safety factors are based on geometry in that world rather than stress or ductility. There are cathedrals built using these principles that have survived major earthquakes, heavy WWII bombing, and foundation settlements that would get a modern building condemned.

The greatest trick that bond stress ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist.
 
Wow... I would not have expected glass to be a reasonable lateral system. Laminated or not, we're talking about catastrophic failure here is anything goes wrong.

I'm really not sure I'd ever want to have at something like that.
 
Well, so far, "within its limitations" seem to amount to one story, low importance buildings for which cost is not a primary driver. And the considerable redundancy involved extends far beyond lamination. Glass99 will likely be able to do it better justice but you'll often see redundant walls, redundant laminations within walls, and nifty details to allow for easy, anticipated wall replacement.

We are talking about a material that sort of spontaneously explodes for no reason after all. Nobody's pitching high rise elevator shafts in glass just yet. Although I'm sure there's some maniac at Delft looking into it for after CLT skyscrapers get boring.

Other than the odd guardrail, I leave glass design to the experts. As a material, it's not nearly forgiving enough to accommodate the fumblings if a uninitiated hack.

The greatest trick that bond stress ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist.
 
Yup... Nickel Sulfur inclusion if I remember right. Something like 1 in 10000 fail because of the stress from the crystal inclusion.

The interesting thing about the tempered glass in the code is the apppication / new requirement for heat-soaked tempered if you are not wanting to use other laminates. Heat soaking encourages those panels with inclusion(s) to fail. They don't always fail during the heating and cooling, but the inclusions tend to have grown and this makes the panel even more likely to fail catastrophically.
 
I'm not sure I would like to live or work in a goldfish bowl. There's no place to blow your nose in privacy. And I'm glad I don't have to wash the windows.

BA
 
To each his own, bridgebuster. It wouldn't appeal to everyone.

BA
 
it shouldn't. The hotel could put up a sign "now you know what it's like in the army."
 
What is the R factor on silicone caulking? It is pretty ductile....

There was an article in a recent Modern Steel Construction where they talked about connecting the glass pieces together to act as a shearwall at some new buildings at Colorado School of Mines, but it had a steel gravity load system.

Glass's 1st pic is cool, but I would be scared with snow and window buckling the skinny brittle glass wall. But then that is why I don't design in glass.
 
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