Modelling the strength of annealed glass in structural applications

Glass is increasingly used in load-bearing structures, e.g. staircases, balustrades, pillars, beams, floors, roofs and as panels under shear loading. Currently, however, there is a lack of methods for the design of glass in these applications. In theory, soda lime silicate glass is the strongest building material which can be mass produced. In practice the strength of glass is an abstruse parameter which assumes values within a wide range. The purpose of the thesis is to develop models which predict the strength. These models are to be implemented in computational tools which can be used by the designer. The models would furthermore enable the classifiction of glass elements. These models take into account that fracture has a stochastic dimension. Within the frame of the research, experiments are carried out in order to verify the computational models.