Enhanced Effective Thickness of Multi-Layered Laminated Glass

Abstract

The stiffness and strength of laminated glass, a composite of glass layers bonded together by polymeric interlayers, depend upon shear coupling between the glass plies through the polymer. In the design practice, this effect is commonly considered by defining the effective thickness, i.e., the thickness of a monolith with equivalent bending properties. Traditional formulations have been proposed for a package of two layers of glass and one polymeric interlayer, but their extrapolation to a higher number of layers gives in general inaccurate results. Here, the recently-proposed Enhanced Effective Thickness method is extended to the case of laminated glass beams composed i) by three layers of glass of arbitrary thickness, or ii) by an arbitrary number of equally-thick glass layers. Comparison with numerical experiments confirms the accuracy of the proposed approach.