The Centre for Fire and Explosion Studies (CFES) has a sustained record of excellence in research, aiming at improving and promoting a global approach towards fire and explosion research. Recognising that the key to the successful delivery of research contracts is to have first class researchers, CFES aims to attract high quality research students and post-doctoral research fellows and offer them the vigorous training that will provide every single one of them with the head start to a successful and fulfilling career. The mission of CFES is to develop and validate advanced predictive tools for fire and explosion studies, and to promote the application of the predictive tools in design and in the development of prevention/mitigation techniques.
During the past years, SKLFS has cooperated with CFES in the project of “Glazing Behavior in a Fire Environment”. This project was led by Kingston University and University of Science and Technology (USTC), which is part of an European Commission 6th Framework Programme. Prof. Jennifer Wen is the scientist in charge at Kingston University, and Prof. Sun Jinhua is the scientist in charge at State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS), USTC. Dr. Wang Qingsong, the Asso. Prof. at SKLFS, is the researcher. The three years research project lasted from Sep. 2007 to Nov. 2010, consisting of two phases, incoming and return phases. At the incoming phase, from Sep. 2007 to Sep. 2009, the work was conducted at Kingston University, where the crack initiation and dynamic crack mechanism of glass under thermal loading were investigated. At the return phase, from Sep. 2009 to Nov. 2010, the work was conducted at USTC, and the fracture behaviors of glass under thermal loading were experimentally researched.
After three years efforts, the problem of how to predict the crack path was solved and was implemented in the finite element code, and a calculation method for the stress intensity factors near the crack tip was proposed. Furthermore, the probabilistic and determinant laws of glass crack under thermal loading, and as a result, the Weibull two and three distribution functions were proposed. Furthermore the three dimensional finite element codes were developed with all the new progresses embedded. The related output was published on Numerical Heat Transfer, Part B: Fundamentals and presented on some international conference. These outputs could provide a powerful technical support for glass design in building.
