Slender high strength steel column laterally supported by glass panes
D. Dierks1, E.M.P. Huveners1, H.H. Snijder2, R.C. Spoorenberg2
1 Volantis, Venlo, the Netherlands
2 Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Structural steel is a material that allows for slender columns. However, slender steel columns usually have a low load bearing resistance due to flexural buckling. It is possible to suppress flexural column buckling by adding glass panes. Thus, use can be made of the steel section’s squash load reducing the amount of steel involved and obtaining a highly transparent glass-steel column. In this paper, a new type of slender transparent glass-steel column is proposed, consisting of a high strength steel bar supported in lateral direction by glass panes. Its feasibility is shown experimentally and numerically. It is also shown that the design has sufficient redundancy to allow for the loss of supporting glass panes without a reduction of the load bearing capacity. The key design feature of this glass-steel column is the way the glass panes are connected to the steel bar, namely by sliding steel sleeves to avoid direct stresses to occur in the glass panes due to axial column deformation.
Key words: High strength steel, column, glass panes, flexural buckling, redundancy, epoxy adhesive bonded joint, finite element analyses, experiments