Design of glass elements for lateral torsional buckling: A review of existing approaches

Structural glass is being used in increasingly challenging applications by engineers and architects; however there is currently no universally adopted analytical method for design of monolithic slender glass elements subject to lateral-torsional buckling. As a result designers must use guidance from several different sources. In this study, a number of prevalent standards and design guides are examined and design calculations undertaken using the methods proposed therein. The design results are compared to experimental data from literature in order to assess the level of conservatism in each method. A noticeable difference is observed among the investigated approaches, with some
potentially unsafe estimations of design buckling capacity. Local tensile stresses are investigated as well as global buckling behavior, as this is an important consideration when designing brittle glass elements. Finally, a parametric study is undertaken to assess the influence of key variables on the design solutions.