Redundancy tests on glass fins (Challenging Glass Journal #7)

Glass is a brittle material which can break easily. How to apply glass, a favored structural material for architects for its transparency, as a safe structural element like a fin or a beam? Bonding several glass sheets together with PVB-foils gives the structural element redundancy.

However, what happens exactly when the glass breaks is hard to predict. Therefore Octatube performs fragility tests to understand more of the post breakage behavior. Welcome in the world of glass fractography versus structural engineering.

Find out the conclusions of a series of inhouse tests (in our factory/testing facility in Delft (NL)) we did full scale for several projects as described in our Challenging Glass Paper: ‘Redundancy tests on glass fins’.

Read the paper: https://cgc.openaccess.ac/index.php/cgc/article/view/299 
Authors: Peter van de Rotten, Wouter van der Sluis, Michele Arinze Akilo

Since 2010, Octatube has adopted glass fins as structural components in at least 20 different projects, both in facades and roofs. Like the Van Gogh Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Tottenham Experience.