The selection and performance of adhesives for a steel–glass connection

Frame-supported glass structures such as curtain walls consist of glass infill plates mounted onto a framework of metallic elements. The longitudinal shear transfer at the interface of the glass and the metal is generally insufficient to mobilise composite action between the two materials, thereby making the units structurally inefficient. In this paper we investigate five candidate adhesives for load bearing steel–glass connections by means of mechanical testing and numerical modelling. The mechanical tests on representative steel–glass connections provide useful data for the selection of a suitable adhesive. The systematic characterisation of the time-dependent constitutive models of the bulk adhesives provides data essential for analytical and numerical models. Good agreement between the experimental results and the numerical models provides a basis for improving the structural efficiency of frame-supported glass structures.