Abstract
The use of window glass in building design is becoming increasingly popular. Laminated glass has gained popularity as a suitable and practical alternative to monolithic and insulating glass in many design situations. Laminated glass plate performance is influenced by several factors such as glass thickness, glass type, temperature, aspect ratio, load duration, and hardness of the interlayer material. A new higher order finite element model (presented by the first two authors) using 9-noded quadrilateral elements was applied to investigate laminated glass plates with both different interlayer materials. An experimental load-testing program is described. Two types of interlayer materials, regular polyvinyl butyral and strong formulation of polyvinyl butyral were used. First, simply supported rectangular laminated glass plates with regular polyvinyl butyral interlayer with aspect ratios 1–5 under different temperatures were tested. Second, one set of laminated glass plates with the strong formulation of polyvinyl butyral interlayer was tested under room temperature. The experimental and theoretical results are compared and discussed. In general, the performance of laminated glass with regular polyvinyl butyral interlayer is closer to that of layered glass at higher temperature. Also, laminated glass with strong formulation of polyvinyl butyral interlayer has a significantly larger load resistance than similar regular polyvinyl butyral samples.