Conceptual design and FEM structural response of a suspended glass sphere made of reinforced curved polygonal panels
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Conceptual design and FEM structural response of a suspended glass sphere made of reinforced curved polygonal panels Maurizio Froli · Francesco Laccone
Received: 27 April 2020 / Accepted: 5 August 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The paper introduces a novel concept for structural glass shells that is based on the mechanical coupling of double curved heat-bent glass panels and a wire frame mesh, which constitutes a grid of unbonded edge-reinforcement. Additionally, this grid has the purpose of providing redundancy. The panels have load-bearing function, they are clamped at the vertices and dry-assembled. The main novelty lies in the use of polygonal curved panels with a nodal force transfer mechanism. This concept has been validated on an illustrative design case of a 6 m-diameter suspended glass sphere, in which regular pentagonal and hexagonal spherical panels are employed. The good strength and stiffness achieved for this structure is demonstrated by means of local and global FE models. Another fundamental feature of the concept is that the reinforcement grid provides residual strength in the extreme scenarios in which all panels are completely failed. A quantitative measure of redundancy is obtained by comparing this scenario with the ULS. F. Laccone (B) Institute of Information Science and Technologies “Alessandro Faedo” (ISTI), Italian National Research Council (CNR), Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M. Froli · F. Laccone Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction Engineering, University of Pisa, Largo Lucio Lazzarino 1, 56122 Pisa, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Glass shell · Structural glass · Curved glass · Heat bent · Steel reinforcement · Truncated icosahedron · Finite element analysis
1 Introduction Glass is an ideal material for building skins since it provides for transparency, for resistance to weather phenomena or building separation, and also for loadbearing capacity (Haldimann et al. 2008; Feldmann et al. 2014; Belis et al. 2019). All these capabilities can be simultaneously exploited in building elements such as shear walls and roofs as well as in modern building envelopes where wall and roof elements blend in a single piece. Hence, to maximize the transparency, glass panels are exploited to carry additional loading and not only to support their own weight. A large topological variety and several structural concepts may be found in building envelopes that behave as a single-layer shells. As almost all the materials used in architecture, glass is produced in flat panels of limited sizes and shapes. These flat panels need to be processed in order to tessellate the ideal shell surface, which is segmented in triangle, quad, diamond or polygonal shapes. The selected discretization strategy has direct implications on the geometry and mechanics of the shell. Thus, the actual structure will result in a faceted surface or possibly the panels can be c
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