Influence of pre-loading on the flexural behaviour of annealed glass

Abstract

Abstract Transparency, a highly sought aspect in architectural applications, has led to rising demand for glass in buildings and other structures. The changeover of the role of architectural glass makes it inevitable to characterize the mechanical properties of glass as individually as has been done for all other conventional materials employed in structural applications. Thus the awareness of glass strength is vital for the design of transparent structures made of structural glass. The present work reports displacement-controlled four-point bending tests performed on a set of annealed glass specimens to study the effect of pre-loading value and its duration on the flexural behaviour. Analysis of variance is carried out in Minitab 19 to study the effect of pre-loading and thickness of glass on the failure stress ratio. Analysis of variance results show that pre-load is the most significant factor for the failure stress ratio.