Flexural deformation characterization of glass panel in curtain walls based on digital image correlation technique

Abstract In architectural engineering, full-field mechanical characterization for the outer surface of buildings has been increasingly an essential part of the building safety evaluation, especially for high-rise buildings. However, due to the inherent nature of local and contact measurements of some traditional methods, both measurement accuracy and detected regions are generally quite limited. In this paper, the non-contact digital image correlation (DIC) technique was employed to implement full-field surface flexural deformation characterization for the glass panel of curtain wall system. Firstly, a set of experimental apparatus was designed to obtain the digital speckle image sequences of the tested glass panel under wind load conditions. Secondly, full-field deformation of the glass panel was quantitatively calculated and compared with those data resulted from finite element analysis (FEA) and some traditional measurement devices including strain gauges and digital indicators, which demonstrated that the introduced DIC method not only was capable of achieving full-field flexural deformation measurement for the glass panel, but also could obtain comparable measurement results in comparison with the conventional methods. Consequently, full-field displacement and strain of the glass panel were evaluated, so that surface deflections and curvatures of the panel under wind load conditions were carefully analyzed, by which the wind resistance performance for the glass panel of curtain wall system could be readily characterized.