Kinga Pankhardt

Load Bearing Glasses: Testing of Construction Glasses Kinga Pankhardt

Nowadays glass strongly influences modern architectural design. Architects prefer to design buildings with high transparency or sometimes prefer full transparency. With the increasing transparency of buildings, the engineers can meet with special design and construction problems for glazing and load bearing glass structures. Glass used in building exteriors must resist environmental loads and impacts. Therefore, the appropriate type of glass must be carefully selected. Design and calculation of load bearing glass structures are special areas of civil engineering. Reasonable solutions and models are necessary to calculate glass structures. Engineers are still afraid of the fragile nature of glass, therefore, glass constructions are mostly secondary or tertiary structural elements (in terms of the structural hierarchy of a building). There is a lack of useful glass technical documents and standards, especially for glass engineers. Therefore, this book "Load bearing glasses" is focused on the testing of single and laminated glasses and also demonstrates the influencing factors by creating load bearing glass structures, where the principal loads can be carried by glass elements.