JR Centre for Thin Glass Technology for structural Glass Applications

Thin glass is taken for granted in screens, laptops, tablets and mobile phones in everyday use. The application of very thin glass in the construction industry is new and represents the innovative research potential of this JR Centre.

Glass with a maximum thickness of 2 mm is referred to as thin glass and is usually made of soda-lime glass or aluminium silicate glass. Thin glass exhibits completely new building material behaviour, including extremely high flexibility compared to conventional building materials, and therefore opens up a wide range of new possibilities for applications in construction elements in the building industry, such as columns, beams or special types of façade systems.

For use as a load-bearing component, proof of a standardised bending tensile strength is required. The theoretical strength of glass is given in the literature as around 10,000 MPa. The actual measured flexural tensile strength of non-tempered glass is in the order of around 80 MPa. This enormous difference between theoretical and actually achievable values is due to defects on the surface or in the glass matrix itself, among other things. These significant influencing factors must be identified and evaluated in test series in order to be able to derive correlations for verifying the load-bearing capacity.

However, the test methods established for conventional glass cannot be transferred to thin glass, but must be adapted accordingly or newly developed.

In the majority of cases, laminated safety glass consisting of at least two layers of glass with an intermediate layer of plastic is required for safety reasons. Various types of interlayer film are available on the market. The mechanical characteristics of films of different compositions and the bonding behaviour with glass must be evaluated by means of tests. The advantages and disadvantages must be analysed with regard to their suitability.

The structural design with regard to the bearing significantly determines the load-bearing behaviour of a glass structure. In this context, particular attention is paid to the component connections in the joining technology by analysing local stress concentrations.

Based on the scientific findings with regard to strength, bonding effect and joining technology, possible fields of application for thin glass in structural engineering are identified