Experimental and numerical assessment of structural behaviour of glass balustrade subjected to soft body impact

Glass is a commonly used material in modern architecture not only for building enclosures, but also for glazed barriers preventing building occupants from falling out of balconies and different levels inside buildings. The main purpose of the balustrades is to transfer the imposed loads to the main structure of the building. That includes static loads related to the crowd pressure (horizontal line load applied at the top edge of the balustrade), but also dynamic actions produced by humans in motion. The latter is related to an accidental situation when a moving person accidentally hits the balustrade. The paper provides design principles and a review of existing standards regarding glass balustrades with a special emphasis on dynamic loads. It also presents results of an experimental campaign and numerical studies on the evaluation of the structural safety of fully-glazed balustrades subjected to soft-body impact. It includes experimental characterisation of the impactor and soft body impact tests on a glass balustrade in two states: intact and in post-failure state (with single glass ply damaged). The results of the numerical studies show good agreement with experiments in terms of displacement of the balustrade, stress in glass and acceleration of the impactor.