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.‎