Reinforced glass cantilever beams

Abstract

This paper focusses on the main glass beams of an All Transparent Pavilion that has been built and exhibited at Delft University of Technology. The glass beams span a total of 7.2 m and cantilever 1.2 m on both ends. Ordinary annealed float glass layers are adhesively bonded to form full-section beams. These beams are the first of their kind to have ever been applied in practice. The underlying safety concept –to deal with brittle glass failure– shows some analogy with reinforced concrete: the glass beams are reinforced by adding a small stainless steel profile. Before applying three of these beams in the pavilion, a full-scale prototype has been built and tested destructively to validate its structural behaviour. The results show failure starts at reasonable stress levels, but more important, the cracked and failed beam showed a significant residual strength.