ABSTRACT
A variety of hybrid structural glass beams have successfully been tested to overcome the brittle failure behavior of glass-only beams. Especially the reinforced laminated glass beam was positively evaluated for a variety of test conditions, beam sizes, glass types and reinforcement percentages. Recently, the feasibility of applying those beams in statically indeterminate systems was experimentally tested at Ghent University. Five-point bending tests were performed on two-sided reinforced beam specimens. In addition, two reinforcement percentages and two conditioning and testing temperatures were used. All tests resulted in a safe load-carrying behavior with significant post-fracture strength and ductility. Depending on the reinforcement percentage and temperature, a different ultimate failure mechanism was encountered. However, after reaching this maximum load, the beams did not fully collapse and possessed a limited, however significant, residual load-carrying capacity. These residual mechanisms, presented in this paper, are the result of load redistribution in the statically indeterminate system.
