A Mixed FEM for Simulating Laminated Glass Beam Stiffness and Strength

Abstract

This contribution shows the effectiveness of a simple mixed Finite Element Model (FEM) for simulating the mechanical behavior of structural Laminated Glass (LG) beams, by numerically reproducing several laboratory tests of small LG specimens taken from literature. The proposed mixed model adopts small displacements and Euler-Bernoulli beam hypotheses and assumes glass layers displacements and polymeric interlayer shear actions as independent fields. Numerical simulations show that such a simple model is able to correctly reproduce LG specimens’ initial stiffness and first peak strength and can be adopted for design purposes of LG elements at a larger scale