Calibrated Numerical Approach for the Dynamic Analysis of Glass Curtain Walls under Spheroconical Bag Impact

The structural design of glass curtain walls and facades is a challenging issue, considering that building envelopes can be subjected extreme design loads. Among others, the soft body impact (SBI) test protocol represents a key design step to protect the occupants. While in Europe the standardized protocol based on the pneumatic twin-tire (TT) impactor can be nowadays supported by Finite Element (FE) numerical simulations, cost-time consuming experimental procedures with the spheroconical bag (SB) impactor are still required for facade producers and manufacturers by several technical committees, for the impact assessment of novel systems. At the same time, validated numerical calibrations for SB are still missing in support of designers and manufacturers. In this paper, an enhanced numerical approach is proposed for curtain walls under SB, based on a coupled methodology inclusive of a computationally efficient two Degree of Freedom (2-DOF) and a more geometrically accurate Finite Element (FE) model. As shown, the SB impactor is characterized by stiffness and dissipation properties that hardly match with ideal rigid elastic assumptions, nor with the TT features. Based on a reliable set of experimental investigations and records, the proposed methodology acts on the time history of the imposed load, which is implicitly calibrated to account for the SB impactor features, once the facade features (flexibility and damping parameters) are known. The resulting calibration of the 2-DOF modelling parameters for the derivation of time histories of impact force is achieved with the support of experimental measurements and FE model of the examined facade. The potential and accuracy of the method is emphasized by the collected experimental and numerical comparisons. Successively, the same numerical approach is used to derive a series of iso-damage curves that could support practical design calculations.

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