Cantilevered Laminated Glass Balustrades: The Conjugate Beam Effective Thickness Method—Part II: Comparison and Application

Cantilevered laminated glass installed in continuous U-profile base shoes are regularly constructed as structural glass guards, parapets, and windscreens. The structural performance of laminated glass is strongly dependent on the shear coupling offered by the interlayer, between the bounding layered and monolithic limits of the glass lites. The most common simplified design approach consists of defining the effective thickness, i.e., the thickness of a monolithic section with equivalent properties. However, established effective thickness methods lack correlation with stress and deflection observed in numerical models simulating bearing support of cantilevered laminated glass in an ordinary U-profile. The analytical Conjugate Beam Effective Thickness (CBET) method proposed in Part I of the present work accounts for the influence of different boundary and loading conditions, and is readily applied to evaluate the flexural performance of two-ply cantilevered laminated glass beams. In this paper, results evaluated with the proposed CBET method are compared with existing analytical methods and numerical results for case study examples, demonstrating improved accuracy with respect to existing effective thickness methods for cantilevered laminated glass beams. The obtained closed-form formulas for evaluation of deflection- and stress-effective thickness are summarized in tables to facilitate the practical application of the CBET method in the design practice.

Read the article.