Investigating annealed glazing response to long-duration blast

Abstract

The transient dynamic response of annealed glazing to blast loading is a complex phenomenon dependent upon explosive proximity, glazing material properties and structural arrangement. With positive pressure durations in excess of 100ms, long-duration blasts produce substantial impulse and dynamic pressures. Annealed glazing accounted for ~90% of UK building glass at the end of 20th century with similar levels of utilisation the world over. As a brittle material, it cannot undergo plastic deformation resulting in sudden failure under tension. As the minimum level of glazing resistance to blast, annealed glazing breakage introduces significant hazard to a building’s occupants and those in surrounding regions.

The original contribution of this PhD has been to investigate and quantify annealed glazing response to long- duration blast with an emphasis on the influence of structural arrangement via variable glazing thickness, area, aspect ratio and edge support conditions. Eighteen full-scale blast trials were conducted where results have shown that notionally elastic supports can prevent glazing breakage versus rigidly clamped arrangements. Edge conditions were also found to exert an important influence on both fragmentation and potential fragment hazard with elastic supports shown to produce large, angular fragments versus rigid arrangements which generated significant cracking and smaller fragments. The quantification of peak panel deflection, breakage time and applied breakage impulse has demonstrated significant variability with the influence of edge supports and aspect ratio found to be dependent on proximity to a threshold area for a particular thickness. This research has also examined computational models of glazing response and blast wave propagation produced with the Applied Element Method (AEM) and CFD. Comparisons with experimental data have shown reasonable levels of agreement, indicating the potential to provide future predictive capacity.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Simon Clubley: orcid.org/0000-0003-3779-242X

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