Laminated safety glass is widely recognized for its superior impact energy absorption, retention of structure, and minimization of injury due to shard fragments. This feature makes it one of the essential materials in automotive and construction applications, among a host of protective uses. This paper reports on a numerical investigation of laminated safety glass under impact loadings by systematically varying the layer configurations while keeping the same total thickness of the glass. We have studied three specific configurations: 2-layer configuration with each layer at 6mm, 3-layer configuration with each layer at 4mm, and 5-layer configuration with four outer layers at 2mm and a central layer at 4 mm (2mm/2mm/4mm/2mm/2mm). The total glass thickness is kept the same in all these configurations, with an overall interlayer thickness of PVB set at 3.04 mm.
Ball drop tests have been numerically simulated using ABAQUS/Explicit. In this simulation, glass is modeled with brittle cracking behavior to show the crack pattern after impact loading. The fracture pattern in the numerical simulations was compared to experimental results to validate the simulation.
This paper underlines the modeling techniques used in the simulation and discusses the influence of some simulation parameters on results. The findings provide valuable insights into the behavior of laminated safety glass under impact conditions, aiding the development of optimized configurations that enhance safety and post-impact structural integrity.
A key conclusion is that the number of glass plies significantly affects the residual rigidity of the structure after impact despite maintaining a constant total thickness. The 2-ply laminated glass exhibited a substantial loss of rigidity post-impact, whereas the 5-ply laminated glass retained most of its structural integrity with only slightly reduced rigidity.
Milad Hosseinkhani
Experimental and Numerical Model for Impact Loading on Multi-layered Laminated Safety Glass
Company: Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
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