Author(s)

MIROSLAV PREMROV, BOŠTJAN BER & ANDREJ ŠTRUKELJ

Abstract

As a natural raw material timber shows indisputable environmental excellence and certainly represents one of the best choices for sustainable construction. The use of glazing in buildings has always contributed to openness, visual comfort and better daylight situation. The features of the both building materials lead to the development of a new type of highly attractive structures, the so-called timber–glass buildings. However, in a view to maximising the use of natural solar radiation gains, the most of the glazing is usually placed in the south facade of such buildings, which can lead to many structural problems, especially when the building is exposed to heavy horizontal loads. In such cases it is usu- ally to assure a horizontal stability by using additional visible diagonal elements or by internal wall elements. In this study we are presenting another solution by using timber-frame wall elements with fixed insulating glazing placed on the external side of the timber frame where the glass pane is consid- ered as a load-bearing element. It is presented that such timber–glass load-bearing wall element can significantly contribute to the overall horizontal resistance of the whole building. The behaviour of load-bearing timber–glass wall elements is additionally modelled with FE model where the bonding line is modelled with spring elements. With such developed mathematical model it is possible further parametrically to analyse many various parameters which significantly influence on the capacity, stiff- ness and failure mechanism of such composite elements.

Keywords

experiments, finite element modelling, glass, timber, structural stability