Promoting the Allowable Stress Method for the Design of Glass Members and Frameless Structures

This study promotes the construction of transparent spatial structures with a minimum use of metal frameworks, by employing glass panels as primary members. The Allowable Stress Method, which is used to verify building components made of different materials, but is not available for glass members, is also proposed. In this regard, a sound theoretical investigation on tempered glass members under in-plane bending and lateral-torsional buckling (LTB) is summarized. Original experiments are used in support of the load-carrying capacity analysis of glass specimens. Their LTB failure is also addressed, as a function of slenderness ratio, to derive the allowable stress function. As shown, the presented findings result in robust equations for determining the allowable stress of tempered panels in bending, and in a general approach that can be extended to various loading conditions. The proposed methodology is finally applied to the exemplificative structural design of a three-dimensional frameless roof.