The Safety Analysis Of Glass Curtain Wall Under Windborne Debris

Glass curtain wall is one of the most widely used facade during last 30 years in China.Many architects are fascinated by its lightness and transparency.Thus glass curtain wall has become the first choice for plenty of high-rise and super high-rise buildings.However,the vulnerability is an unavoidable weakness of glass,which prevent it from becoming a structure-use material.Windborne debris is the major cause of glass failure during extreme events,such as hurricane and typhoon,while a quantitative analysis is not included in current standard systems of curtain wall.Based on mechanical analysis,a safety analysis model has been established in this thesis for glass curtain wall under windborne debris impact.The design theory that is currently used are firstly introduced as well as researches related to windborne debris as the background for this topic.Then the testing methods for impact resisting of glass curtain wall from different standards and three damage predicting models are illustrated.Based on aerodynamic characteristic of windborne debris and impact mechanism of glass material,a theoretical predicting model is established.However,this theoretical model can hardly be used in engineering project due to a lack of basic data and complicated process.Therefore,a simplified predicting model is introduced,and modeling results on HongKong Revenue Tower fit the real data well,which proves the applicability of this simplified model.Moreover,physically meaningful factors are involved by optimization of the model.