Design concept for cold bent shell structures made of thin glass

Spatial load bearing structures in the building sector are usually built with the help of aligned steel‐glass elements in the form of a net. The installed glass elements are flat and have a large glass thickness, in order to achieve sufficient plate stiffness. This implied a less economical use of materials. Nowadays, due to new manufacturing techniques it is possible to use resource saving materials, e.g. thin‐walled laminated safety glass ( t total ≤ 5.38 mm). For this purpose, the thin‐walled laminated safety glass consists of thin glasses ( t < 3 mm) and interlayer materials. The thin‐walled laminated safety glass is cold bent onto shaping frame girder elements (uniaxial or double curved) at the installation site with subsequent continuous supports. In general, this leads to a spatial load bearing capacity of the single element under pressure and suction loads. The process of cold bending is easily feasible due to the lower resetting effect of the thin‐walled laminate. For this case, a state of cold bending is activated in the glazing. With additional loading perpendicular to their shell level a state of loading is generated. To this, the load‐bearing capacity depends on many parameters (time‐ and temperature‐dependent material behaviour, geometry and supporting conditions). The aim of curved single elements is to achieve maximum geometric stiffness more specifically maximum static resistance E Rd . For this reason, the influencing parameters were mathematically, numerically and experimentally investigated and discussed plus transferred to a design method for two exemplary cold bent structures (uniaxial or double curved).