EngineeringStructures,Vol.

0141-0296(95)00199-9

ELSEVIER

18, No. 8, pp. 645~52, 1996 Copyright 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0141-0296/96 $15.00 + 0.00

Nonlinear finite element analysis of glass panels

Andrew Kwok Wai So and Siu L a i Chan
Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Horn, Kowloon, Hong Kong (Received August 1993; revised version accepted March 1995)

Glass panels which are widely used in curtain wall systems, behave nonlinearly under high wind load when their deflections exceed about 3/4 of their thickness. The American and the Canadian design codes for curtain wall and window systems have made it mandatory to include the effect of large deflection in the design and analysis of glass panels. This paper presents a versatile finite shell element method for nonlinear analysis of glass panels subjected to high wind loads. The accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated via comparison with the results of previous studies and experiments. The advantage of the present method is its versatility in handling complex loading and boundary conditions whilst its longer computational time has been effectively offset by the adoption of the efficient incremental-iterative minimum residual displacement method of analysis and the availability of fast personal computers. Using the examples studied in this paper, it was found that the nonlinearity in glass may violate the linear assumption in the practical loading range, resulting in unexpected glass behaviour if the linear theory is used. More interestingly, the use of higher strength glass, the tempered or the heat-strengthened glass, will not increase the load resistance of the panel when it is under in-plane loads causing instability. Copyright 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.

Keywords:glass panels, wind loads, finite element analysis

1. Introduction
it reduces the visibility through the glass: the surface wave of tempered glass distorts the reflected image and the reflections multiple surfaces of laminated glass also distort vision. The major reason for special care in the design of glass is that it has no ductility to allow a moment or force redistribution like steel and concrete frames. Further, their over-design is costly. In Hong Kong, the facade system normally takes 15-20% of the total construction cost in a commercial building. The curtain wall system is directly under the attack of strong wind during its normal life. The basic design wind pressure in Hong Kong can be up to 6 kPa for buildings with a level higher than 250 m, which is not uncommon, as many buildings are constructed along the hillside. Under the strong wind action, glass panels deflect considerably so that the linear theory does not suffice. In fact, in a number of full-scale mock-up tests by the second author, nearly all glass panels deflected by more than several times their thickness during their strength and performance tests. This high nonlinearity implies that a nonlinear theory should be used to predict their structural behaviour.

Glass panels are widely used in curtain wall systems to separate the interior from the exterior of a building. They have a distinct advantage of providing a clear view of the outside environment for the occupants. Large glass panels of size in excess of 1.5 m z are nowadays commonly used in commercial buildings. In practice, they are structurally glazed by structural sezlant on the four sides or two sides with the other two edges clamped along the transoms (see Figure 1). Aesthetically speaking, their appearance generally is more appealing ~Lhanother finishes. In spite of the wide use of glass, its behaviour and properties are not very well known to the engineer when compared to other materials like steel and concrete. Its structural importance cannot be overlooked. Its failure will lead directly to glass debris falling onto the street level and this is commonly encountered in many buildings. Due to their brittleness, there is normally no warning of a breakage. Although laminated and tempered glass lowers the chance of harmful damage, its use may not be preferred as

645

646

Nonlinear finite element analysis of glass panels: A. K. W. So and S. L. Chan

1

v
Glass

v2

Mullion

I
3

Plead Spnge"-~ wadga Structural Se~ngBlock~SII

Section 1-1

WeatherinSealant g Rod

I Can
Section 2

A Typical two-sided structural glazing design

GIIUll ~,~ ~ : /

We~hering 8eakmt

WeatheringSeallnt

J.-

iliar with the finite element method which has a stronger physical perception, the proposed method should be more readily accepted by the profession. This paper is addressed to the application of a refined finite element technique to the geometrically nonlinear analysis of glass panels. The application of the finite element method to the nonlinear analysis of glass panels appears to be limited and the recently developed powerful numerical techniques have not been fully utilized. The triangular element is selected as a basic element for idealization of the plated structure since its shape can be easily adapted to various complicated boundary conditions. Numerical examples on the analysis of the snap-through behaviour of a shallow shell, the stress distribution of a tested glass panel and the predicted failure load of a series of glass plates are given to verify the proposed method. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the application of this versatile finite element method to the analysis of glass panels of complex geometry undergoing large deflections. Most of the finite element procedures used for the analysis of glass structures are rather obsolete and the sophisticated and recently developed techniques for the finite element method have not been used for the analysis of glass structures. The accuracy of the proposed finite element method will be compared against a number of problems for which solutions by other methods or test results are available. In fact, the nonlinearity of glass panels in the working load range has provided a very important chance to apply the nonlinear finite element method to realistic engineering structures.

Sttucturld ~=--~ S.lden~t

1.1. Element formulation and numerical procedure

.o IL-JI
Section 2

GluIplate

/U

Section 3

A Typical four-sided structural glazing design Figure I Typical structural glazed system
There are several methods to tackle the large deflection problems of plates. Early works in the area include the finite difference method by Kaiser 1 and Vallabhan and Wang 2, the closed-form solution by Levy3, the Galerkin method by Beason 4 and the finite element method by AITayyib5. The close-formed solutions can only be obtained for some idealized boundary conditions and initial plate geometry, which may not accurately reflect the actual condition of the glass panels. The Galerkin and the finite difference methods, in general, involve less computational work than the finite element method but may be limited to standard or simple plate geometry. For glass panels of curved surface and under complicated boundary conditions such as the edges not being completely restrained along their sides, these methods may be too complex. The finite element method is generally considered to be most versatile in terms of flexibility. The modification of an existing finite element program for glass analysis is also believed to be a simpler task than the coding of a complete finite difference program. Its disadvantage of heavy computational time is reduced by the powerful incremental iterative nonlinear numerical methods developed and also the low-priced and fast microcomputers. Further, as the engineer is more ram-

Whilst the objective of this paper is to demonstrate the application of the nonlinear finite element method to the design and analysis of glass panels, the detailed formulation of the finite element used in the present studies will not be given. However, a brief description of the method used in the analysis is necessary in order to provide a reference for the readers in selecting an element for the analysis of this type of structures. A complete and detailed discussion on the element formulation is given in Reference 6. In general, a thin shell structure has a thickness much smaller than its lateral dimensions and resists the external forces by the combined membrane and the bending actions. To model the behaviour of such a structure, the bending and the membrane stiffness must be considered in an analysis. Due to the thinness of glass panels used in practice, the shear strain energy is minimal and thus the facet element in conjunction with the Kirchhoff thin shell theory is adopted herein. To be consistent with the general engineering analysis, each element node is formulated to have six degrees of freedom which are the three translational and the three rotational displacements in and about the three mutually perpendicular axes. The bending and membrane stiffnesses are uncoupled at element level and each possesses three degrees of freedom. The in-plane stiffness of the present element is chosen from the one by Allman 7. The advantage of using the element is due to the adoption of the drilling degree of freedom, with which an additional fictitious degree of freedom to prevent zero in-plane rotational stiffness when all elements lie on the same plane, is not required. Each inplane stiffness component possesses three degrees of freedom at each node (i.e. the two translations and the one rotation as shown in Figure 2) and it is formed from a strain

Nonlinear finite element analysis of glass panels: A. K. W. So and S. L. Chan

z

647

y /~lobel X Axle

3 X u3

""3

2
x 0

~ ~y3 BendingStiffness

MembraneStiffness
Figure2
Shell element

field which can be assumed to be constant because the direct strain variation across the elements is not large. The bending stiffness of the element (see Figure 2) to be used for glass analysis is based on the assumption of zero shear strain energy. The Kirchhoff hypothesis is imposed on the element comers and midside nodes only, resulting in the so-called discrete Kirchhoff element. The variation of the transverse displacement, w, is assumed to be cubic along the element side. The explicit form of the element can then be obtained about the axis along one side of the element using an algorithm by Joseph and Rao 8 and Batoz9. The formulated bending stiffness excludes the need to carry out numerical integration and is computationally efficient, especially when a large number of elements are used. As the breakage of glass is a brittle type of failure and is assumed to occur when the maximum stress attains the fracture tensile strength of glass, the advantage of the numerical integration technique for modelling gradually spreading plasticity cannot be used in the present studies and thus an explicit element is preferred. To carry out a bifurcation or an incremental-iterative type of second-order analysis, it is necessary to formulate the tangent stiffness matrix which is composed of the linear, the large displacement and the geometric stiffness matrices. The linear stiffness matrix is obtained by adding the in-plane and bending components of the triangular element as described. The large displacement matrix can be considered implicitly by a co-ordinate updating process and the geometric stiffness matrix is obtained by the product of the Cauchy stre:~s and the second-order strain. The complete matrix has been given by So6.

invisible hairy cracks on its surface. The failure stress of a piece of glass is more dependent on the density of these hairy cracks than on the theoretical breakage stress which can be as high as 14000 MPa ~. Thus, a rational design failure stress is expresed in terms of the duration of load (WeibuU's theory ]~ for the failure of brittle material), treatment of glass to reduce surface tensile stress and the area of glass panel being considered. It also depends on the moisture on the glass surface. Heat strengthened and tempered glass can be used to reduce the tensile stress on the surface of the glass panels, but they simultaneously reduce the visibility through the glass. Also, the presence of impurities such as nickel sulphide will lead to spontaneous breakage of this type of glass. In some cases such as glass fins, this tempering process may become useless since the bending stress is about the strong axis of the glass plate. To accurately compute the maximum stress in a panel for checking of stress against failure, the large deflection theory allowing for the membrane stress should be used. In the breakage analysis of annealed glass panels, failure is assumed to occur when the maximum tensile stress is equal to the breaking stress of the glass which, unfortunately, can only be obtained on a statistical basis. In general, a factor of safety of 2.5 is introduced to control the probability of failure to 8/1000. For tempered glass, the breakage stress is normally taken as three to four times that of the annealed glass. The Canadian Code has adopted the failure prediction model developed by Beason and Morgan ~2. A simplified model for failure of glass panels with the effect of load duration was also presented by Brown ~3. The resistance to breakage for a surface flaw can be expressed as follows.

f rl K:= J [o-(T)]" dT Io

(1)

in which T is the load duration, K/is the resistance to failure by a surface flaw exposed to tensile stress and water vapour, o-(T) is the normal tensile stress at the flaw, expressed as a function of time, n is a constant and its best fit value. From experimental data, n is determined as 16 (See Reference 13) and T/is the duration of loading which causes failure. The glass plate fails when K/reaches some critical value which depends on the flaw's characteristics and the stress rate at the flaw. With equation (1), we can adjust the strength of glass for different load durations. In a computer analysis, we can compute constant stress causing glass breakage and relate this to failure stress with different load durations as follows.

o-~ = o-: [60(n +

(2)

where o-60is the constant stress causing failure of the panel in 60 s. o-: is the constant stress causing failure in T: s. The use of a design factor of 2.5 has been introduced to control the probability of failure (POF) to 0.008. The POF can be expressed in terms of the Weibull distribution as follows POF = 1 - e -B in which, (3)

1.2. Failure criterion

For commercial annealed glass, which is widely used in curtain wall systems, tbe failure and breakage of glass is, generally speaking, due to the stress concentrated at the

648
P E

N o n f i n e a r finite e l e m e n t analysis o f glass panels: A. K. W. So a n d S. L. Chan

1.4. Hinged cylindrical shell

The first example serves to validate the analysis tool for cylindrical structures in a snap-through problem and the strength of the structure when it is made of glass material is then computed. Figure 3 shows a circular cylindrical shell of thickness 12.7 mm and subjected to a concentrated central load applied on the convex side. The longitudinal boundaries are hinged and immovable while the curved edges are free. A four-by-four mesh for one-quarter of the panel has been considered. The problem has been used extensively for testing of a new element and the nonlinear solution method for snap-through and snap-back analysis. The results of applied load against the central deflections are shown in Figure 4. In this example, the arc-length '4 solution method is used for the load-increment and the minimum residual displacement method 15 for load-iteration. The results agree very well with those by Surana 16 and Sabir and Lock 17. In the second example, the thickness of the cylindrical shell is reduced to 6.35 mm while the geometric and physical data are the same as in the previous example. The structural response of the modified structure is quite different from the previous example. Snap-back is observed in addition to snap-through. The load-deflection curves for the central point and midpoint of the curved edge are plotted in Figure 5. Again, the results compare very well with those of References 16 and 17. The accuracy of the NAShell program in analysing the structures confirms the validity of the suggested element and its associated numerical procedure in dealing with problems involving large change of geometry. The program encounters no divergence in tracing the complete equilibrium path, demonstrating that the proposed method can handle, not only the nonlinear analysis of glass panels, but also other types of shell structures which exhibit instability and snapping behaviour.

R L (I E
0

=2540 mm =254 mm =0.1 rad =3.10275 kN/mrn'

=0.3

Case 1
h =12.7 mrn

Case 2 h =6.35 mm

Figure3 Hinged cylindrical shell

0,4

- -

Ver~:ll ddection at pobt C

....

Virgil dlglctlon id point E

~ ;>

/ A/

10

15

20

25

30

35

Displacement(rnrn)

Figure4 L o a d - d e f l e c t i o n curve f o r cylindrical shell (case 1,

thickness = 12.7 ram)

1.5. Curved glass panel

In this example, a curved glass panel with base dimensions of 1500mm x 1500 mm, radius of 1500 ram, Young's modulus of 70000 MPa, Poisson's ratio of 0.22 and thickness of 8 ram, and under uniform lateral load is analysed
0.8

8= Z t- oj
where e is the natural number, Ao and So are the area and the characteristic strength of the reference glass panel, respectively, and A and S,,.p.r are the area and characteristic strength, respectively, of the glass panel. S,,,p.r is a function of the Weibull parameter, m, p is the pressure and r is the aspect ratio. From the collected failure data for in-service glass 13 and fitted to equation (3), the Weibull parameters m and So were obtained as 7 and 32.1 MPa, respectively, for a reference area, Ao, of 1 mL These values are used in the Canadian Code and adopted herein.

0.4
A Z

O.

1.3. Numerical examples

The developed finite element method is used for the checking of stress in several types of glass structures. The method will first be validated against bench mark large deflection problems, then the analytical solution for a simply supported plate under uniformly distributed load and finally the breakage analysis of a series of tested glass panels. These examples should demonstrate how the finite element method can be used effectively to predict the strength of these structures which this type of analysis appears to have not yet solved.

0'
X ., &

-0.2,

"

o.
-0,4 x

s.... *'
Sabl ~d Lock

,,
I

~.
~

.j7
I

",
"~

10

15

20

25 30 Displacement (mrn)

Figure 5 L o a d - d e f l e c t i o n curve f o r cylindrical shell (case 2,

thickness = 6.35 mm)

Nonlinear finite element analysis of glass panels: A. K. W. So and S. L. Chan

Posltlveoressure direction
(normal tb surface), , (normal zo 8unsce)

649

I~legetht9prel~sur~direction

./

/'/

,oonner

R = L = E = v h =

1500mm 1500mm 71000MPa 0.22

assumed to act perpendicularly to the glass surface. In Figure 7, we can see the load-deflection path at the plate centre and the failure loads for annealed glass and tempered glass under positive and negative pressure acting on the projected base area. Failure is assumed when the maximum principle tensile stress reaches the breakage strength 14.25 MPa which is calculated from equations (3) and (4) with POF = 0.008, Ao = 1 m 2, So = 32.1 MPa and rn -- 7. For tempered glass, the failure stress is assumed to be four times the value for annealed glass 18. In Figures 8 and 9, we can see the principal stresses on the bottom surface for negative and positive pressure, respectively, at the instant of failure pressure. It can be seen in the analysis that the failure pressure for annealed and tempered glasses is on the same rates as stress for the tensile load (positive pressure) case where the geometrical change is not significant. However, for the compressive load (negative pressure) case, the failure pressure
oenter

=8mm

Figure 6

L a y o u t a n d p r o p e r t i e s o f c u r v e d glass panel

(see Figure 6). The longitudinal boundaries are hinged and immovable while the curved edges are restrained in the longitudinal direction. Due to symmetry, only a quarter is analysed with a grid size of 11 x 11. The wind load is
~, 220 0. ~, 2o0 '~ 180
Fa

i
-7

15 5

-3

8 =
rE

16o
140

120
100

A) Stress contour at failure load for annealed glass

conner oenter

60

__~E._ Failure load for Annealed Glass

20

012 0:4 0'.S 018 1 1.2 Deflection at Centre along the Loading Direction (mm)

t
I

) I

A) Positive Pressure
90

/o
Failurepoint for Annealed Glass

,-,8O

D. ~" 70

Failurepoint for Tempered Glass

-10

-10

50

.o
13

Q- 4O

30 20 10 00

Deflection at Cenlre along the Loading Direction (mm)

oonner

B) Stress contour at failure load for tempered glass B) Negative Pressure

Figure 7
Load-deflection p a t h at c e n t r e o f c u r v e d glass p a n e l

Figure8

Principal stress on b o t t o m p r e s s u r e (all stresses in M P a )

surface under negative

650

Nonlinear finite element analysis of glass panels: A. K. W. So and S. L. Chan

center

1.5
W h

f
[

0.5

-I + - TImolheniko 18 and W o ~

9 oonner A) Stress contour at failure load for annealed glass oeriter

100

200

3o0

Figure 10 Load-deflection of a simply supposed square plate

12
olo= ~TI0

30 O0

100

200

. ~ 300

Figure 11 Bending stresses and centre and corner

oonner B) Stress contour at failure load for tempered glass 12
v ~

Figure9 Principal stress on bottom surface under positive

pressure (all stresses in MPa)

ratio may not be equal to the ratio for failure pressure on breakage stresses. This is due to the change in the geometry of the glass resulting in the nonlinearity between the stress and the load. In other words, the strength of a glass structure made of tempered and annealed glass is not always in the same ratio as their breakage stress. As demonstrated in this example, the tempering process for glass has a very different response when the structure is under loads in different directions. Care should be taken in allowing for this discrepancy in glass structure behaviour which is not a consideration in structures made of other materials. Although concrete is also weak in tension, its design generally ignores the presence of the portion in tension. For glass structures, cracks due to tension will lead directly to the breakage of the complete piece of glass and thus cannot be allowed. This characteristic of glass as an engineering material significantly alters the design philosophy and concept.

Eh'

J
100

V CentreA = t ~ n k o in X PolnlB ~.Wc~nm~ 18 PointC ~ ! ~

200

qb' Eh'

300

Figure 12 Membrane stresses at centre, centre edge and corner

Nonlinear finite element analysis of glass panels: A. K. W. So and S. L. Chan 1.6. A square simply supported plate under uniform load
In this example, a 10 in simply supported square plate with edge displacement fully restrained is analysed. The thickness of the plate is 0.04 in while the Young's modulus is 27.6 x 106 psi and Poisson's ratio is 0.316. The objective of this problem is to check the accuracy of the stress computed by the developed program. The deflection, bending and membrane stresses are plotted in Figures 10-12, respectively. The analytical solution to this problem by Timc,shenko and Woinowsky-Krieger~9 is also plotted in the sarne figures for comparison. It can be seen from Figures 10-12 that the results obtained by the present program are in very good agreement with the analytical solution. The validity of the method in this problem confirms its reliable application to plate analysis involving a large change in geometry. The accuracy of the analysis results show clearly that the proposed method can be u:~ed for the design of widely used
Table 1 Test results of in-service glass No
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 Mean ratio = 2.51

651

fiat glass under severe wind loads. The analysis results shows not only the thickness required for a certain probability of failure, but also can be used to calculate the corresponding deflection in a single analysis and to determine the highest stressed region in the plate. Obviously, cracking in this highly stressed zone has a more detrimental effect on the strength of the glass than in other areas. This information is valuable for the safety inspection of glass plates.
1.7. Failure test of in-service glass In this example, the test results obtained by the Institute for Research in Construction (IRC) of the National Research Council of Canada for 47 in-service window glass removed from the University of Ottawa's Thompson Residence in 1986 were compared. The breaking stress of glass is determined by assuming the characteristic strength equals 32.1 MPa as recommended by the Canadian code and the corresponding breakage stress is then computed from equation (3). It is

P6o (kPa) 2.84 4.57 2.26 5.27 4.47 4.10 5.62 4.12 5.29 5.01 4.47 5.75 3.66 5.39 4.79 5.70 5.73 6.08 4.58 4.77 5.16 2.92 3.38 5.14 5.54 6.18 5.04 5.03 4.04 5.02 2.19 2.46 2.54 3,75 2.73 3.11 3.11 4.64 4.83 2.66 1.86 3.01 3.27 4.27 4.51 3.98 3.08

Thickness (mm) 4.10 4.00 4.10 4.00 4.05 4.00 4.07 3.90 4.00 4.00 3.93 3.95 3.84 3.90 3.95 3.88 4.04 3.93 3.90 4.09 4.01 4.00 3.97 3.86 4.00 3.96 4.00 3.96 3.96 3.91 3.83 3.77 3.69 3.75 4.00 4.05 3.93 4.01 4.81 3.80 3.83 4.05 3.94 4.04 3.86 3.87 3.74

X (mm) 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1298 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1340 1340 1340 1342 1357 1356 1356 1358 1358 1374 1374 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300

Y (mm) 905 905 905 905 905 905 897 930 929 930 928 925 925 924 925 930 925 900 900 900 895 900 899 930 900 975 975 975 975 975 916 916 916 916 1300 1300 1300 1300 1300 1342 1342 1062 1062 1065 1065 1065 1065

NAShell 1.73 1.73 1.73 1,73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.73 1.70 1.70 1.70 1.70 1.70 1.66 1.66 1.58 1.66 1.43 1.43 1.36 1.43 1.81 1.21 1.21 1.81 1.66 1.73 1.66 1.66 1.58

Ratio 1.64 2.64 1.30 3.04 2.58 2.37 3.24 2.38 3.05 2.89 2.58 3.32 2.11 3.11 2.76 3.29 3.31 3,51 2.64 2.75 2.98 1.68 1.95 2.97 3.20 3.65 2.97 2.97 2.38 2.96 1.32 1.48 1.61 2.26 1.91 2.17 2.29 3.24 2.67 2.21 1.54 1.66 1.97 2.46 2.72 2.40 1.95

652

Nonlinear finite element analysis of glass panels: A. K. W. So and S. L. Chan

prediction of the pressure at failure when large geometrical change is likely.

generally believed that the in-service time reduces the breakage stress of a glass panel due to the increased density of hairy cracks on the glass surface. The equivalent 60 s pressure of the test results and output by NAShell are tabulated in T a b l e 1. The average ratio of test failure results to the predicted breaking load by NAShell is 2.51. This ratio is considered to be in a reasonable range because the failure stress used in NAShell has included the probability of failure of 8/1000. Not single sample had a failure load lower than the predicted load, indicating the reliability of the suggested method for the design of glass panels.

References
1 Kaiser, R. 'Rcchnerische and experimentelle Ermittlung der Durchbiegungen und Spannungen von quadratischen Platten bei freier Auflagerung anden Randern, gleichmassig verteilter Last und grossen Ausbiegungen', A.fa.M.M. 1936, 16 (2), 73-78 2 Vallabhan, C. V. G., and Wang, B. Y-T. 'Nonlinear analysis of rectangular glass by finite difference method', Institute for Disaster Research, Texas Technical University, Lubbock, TX, June 1981 3 Levy, S. 'Bending of rectangular plates with large deflections', NACA Tech. Note 846, 1942 4 Beason, W. L. 'A failure prediction model for windows glass', PhD thesis, Texas Technical University at Lubbock, TX, 1980 5 A1-Tayyib, A. J. 'Geometrically nonlinear analysis of rectangular glass panels by finite element method', PhD thesis, Texas Technical University at Lubbock, TX, 1980 6 So, A. K. W. 'Geometrically nonlinear and breakage analysis of glass systems by the finite element method', PhD thesis, Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 1995 7 Allman, D. J. 'A compatible triangular element including vertex rotations for plane elasticity analysis', Comp. Struct. 1984, 19 (1-

Conclusions
A finite element model is proposed for nonlinear and breakage analysis of glass panels subjected to lateral wind load. The simple triangular element used in the present studies performs very well in the problems studied in this paper. The nonlinear numerical method together with the presented element is capable of dealing with analysis involving large geometrical change and snapping instability. The moderately large deflection behaviour for actual glass panels is believed to be well within the range of application of the proposed method. It can be seen that the behaviour of glass is highly nonlinear in many cases when the breaking pressure is approached. This demonstrates the importance of considering the effect of change in geometry in glass panels when computing stress and deflection. In many cases, when the geometry changes significantly, the stress contour differs very considerably between the linear and the nonlinear analyses. An important observation is that, as the stress is not necessary proportional to the load in the higher nonlinear range, the ratio between the failure pressure for tempered glass may not be equal to four times that of the annealed glass, as is normally assumed for the increase in breaking stress in an annealed glass caused by the tempering process. Thus, for glass structures with behaviour controlled by instability and large deflection, the use of higher strength glass, the tempered glass, may not result in a corresponding increase in strength as in the case for flat glass design. Special care should be taken to select an appropriate type of glass for a particular form of glass structure of different characteristics. A finite element analysis computer program such as the one proposed in this paper can be used in the

2), 1-8 8 Joseph, L T. and Rao, K. 'A fast algorithm for triangular plate bending element', Int. Y. Num. Meth. Engng 1979, 14, 1100-1104 9 Batoz, J. L. 'An explicit formulation for an efficient triangular platebending element', Int. J. Num. Meth. Engng 1982, 18, 1077-1089 10 Dalgliesh,W. A. and Taylor, D. A. 'The strength and testing of window glass', Can. Z Engng 1990, 17, 752-762 11 Weibull, W. 'A statistical theory of the strength of materials', Royal Swedish Institute for Engineering Research, Stockholm, Sweden, No. 151, 1939 12 Beason, W. L. and Morgan, J. R. 'Glass failure prediction model', J. Struct. Engng, ASCE 1984, 110 (2), 197-212 13 Brown, W. G. 'A practicable formulation for the strength of glass and its special application to large plates', Publication NRC 14372, National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 1974 14 Crisfield, M. A. 'A faster incremental/iterative solution procedure that handles snap-through', Comp. Struct. 1981, 13 (1-3), 55-62 15 Chan, S. L. 'Geometric and material nonlinear analysis of beam-columns and frames using the minimum residual displacement method', Int. J. Num. Meth. Engng 1989, 11, 23-30 16 Surana, K. S. 'Geometrically nonlinear formulation for the curved shell elements', Int. J. Num. Meth. Engng 1983, 19 (4), 581-615 17 Sabir, A. B. and Lock, A. C., 'The application of finite elements to the large deflection geometrically nonlinear behaviour of cylindrical shells', in C. A. Brebbia and H. Tottenham (eds), Variational methods in engineering, Southampton University Press, Southampton, 1973, pp. 7/66-7/75 18 Structuraldesign of glass for buildings, National Standard of Canada, CAN/CGSB-12.20-M89, Canadian General Standards Board, 1989 19 Timoshenko,S. P. and Woinowsky-Krieger,S. Theory of plates and shells' (2nd edn) McGraw-Hill, 1959, pp. 396-428