Michael V. Seica

Analysis of Dynamic Response of Architectural Glazing Subject to Blast Loading

The effect of blast loading on civilian structures has received much attention over the past several years. The behavior of architectural glazing is of particular interest owing to the disproportionate amount of damage often associated with the failure of this component in a blast situation. This paper presents the development of a simple yet accurate finite element-based tool for the analysis of architectural glazing subjected to blast loading. This has been achieved through the creation of a user-friendly computer program employing the explicit finite-element method to solve for the displacements and stresses in a pane of glass. Both monolithic and laminated panes have been considered, in single and insulated unit configurations, and employing several types of glass. In all cases, the pane of glass has been modeled as a plate supported by an array of boundary conditions that include spring supports, and two failure criteria are employed. Furthermore, the program is designed to predict the hazard level, ...

Behavior of Steel Rectangular Hollow Sections Subject to Blast Loading

AbstractLarge-scale far-field air-blast testing of cold-formed steel rectangular hollow sections (RHS) in flexure has been performed for the first time. These arena trials illustrated the excellent...

Standard Testing of Glass Revisited - Experimental and Theoretical Aspects

This article deals with standard strength tests of new float glass and focuses on the common four-point bending test. Under similar test conditions, glass specimens behave differently in terms of their fracture patterns, location of the fracture origins, ultimate loads at failure, and the tensile strengths at failure. Therefore, standards require a minimum of 30 specimens in a tested sample and present different requirements with regard to face and edge types of failure, the location of failure within the shear span, etc. This article aims at addressing some of these aspects through an experimental study of relatively large samples subjected to four-point bending and a complementary series of three-point bending tests, and by employing a stochastic theoretical model that helps to gain insight of the findings and generalize the conclusions. The article examines whether edge failure specimens should be excluded from the entire tested sample, investigates whether a failure within the shear span differs from a failure in the central constant bending moment zone of the tested specimen, examines the effect of the sample size, and discusses the effect of the specimen size on the results. The study finds that although edge failure specimens may be included in the strength evaluation, they should better be excluded. It is also found that there is no difference between shear span zone and central zone failures. The study finds that there is a considerable scatter of results when a limited size sample of 30 specimens only is tested and caution is required in the interpretation of the results of small size samples. Finally, yet importantly, the article examines the different tensile strength results obtained from different samples following different standards, because of the size effect, and discusses what the real tensile strength of glass is.