Practical expressions for the design of laminated glass

Due to deformability of the polymeric interlayer, stiffness and strength of laminated glass are usually less than those corresponding to a monolith with same total thickness. A practical design tool consists in the definition of the deflection- and stress-effective thickness, i.e., the thickness of an equivalent monolithic glass that would correspond to, respectively, the same deflection and peak stress of the laminated glass, under the same constraint and load conditions. Very recently, a new model has been proposed for the evaluation of the effective thickness. Here, a comparison is made with the classical approach by Wolfel-Bennison [1,2] and the new method is applied to the most common cases of the design practice, providing synthetic tables for ease of reference and immediate applicability. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.