Structural Glass Beams with Embedded Glass Fibre Reinforcement

This paper investigates the possibilities of pultruded glass fibre rods as embedded reinforcement in SentryGlas (SG) laminated glass beams. To do so, a series of pullout tests, to investigate the bond strength of the rods to the laminate, and a series of beam tests, to investigate the post-breakage response of the beams, have been performed. Both test series have been conducted for round E-glass fibre rods and flat S-glass fibre rods. The pull-out tests showed superior pull-out strength of the flat rods, due to their large bond area. Furthermore, the beam tests showed superior post-breakage performance of the beams with the flat rods, due to higher strength and stiffness of the S-glass fibres. Overall, it is concluded that embedding glass fibre reinforcement in a SG-laminated glass beam is a very promising concept.