Buckling of laminated glass plates using the effective thickness concept

Abstract

The critical buckling loads of laminated glass panels are time and temperature dependent because the mechanical behavior of these elements is governed by the material properties of the interlayers, which exhibit a viscoelastic behavior. Although structural stability is one of the design requirements in laminated glass panels, the literature about buckling of these elements is sparse. The finite element method can be used to calculate the response of laminated glass plates, but the classical eigenvalue buckling analysis implemented in these programs does not consider the time and temperature dependency of the interlayers. In this paper, a simplified analytical method to calculate the buckling critical load of rectangular laminated glass plates is presented, where the equations corresponding to linear-elastic monolithic thin plates are modified with an effective stiffness $D{\left(t,T\right)}_{\mathit{eff}}$ dependent on the geometry, material properties, and boundary conditions of the plate. The analytical equations are validated by numerical simulations on simply-supported laminated glass plates subject to uniaxial, biaxial, and in-plane shear, the maximum discrepancies being less than 10% for all the cases studied in the paper.