Analysis of Cable-Net Systems for Glass Facades

The paper deals with large glass facades using prestressed cable nets in exceptional buildings and halls in the recent decades, which has led to an intense investigations of the system. The facades typically use the laminated glass panes, point-fixed bolted or clamped systems and prestressed net of stainless steel cables. The paper describes numerical analyses of several finite element models concerning such cable-nets. The studied nets have 5 vertical and 4 horizontal cables and involve 4 principal elements: glass panes, point-fixed bolted fittings (“spiders”), the actual bolts and prestressed cables. The material of the glass panes is thermally strengthened and heat soaked thermally toughened safety glass, the “spiders” are typically of austenitic steel 1.4432, while cables are considered as Macalloy stainless steel strands. The proposed FE model using ANSYS software was submitted to a study of the mesh sensitivity, leading to a reasonable meshing and a successful validation based on published tests. The prestressing of the cables was applied as the initial tension. The façade wind loading was taken appropriately in accordance with EN 1991–1-4 as a corresponding pressure/suction and applied on the glass panes surfaces in the final loading step. The paper demonstrates the deflections and tension/stresses of the fractional parametrical study under the given prestressing and loading. The maximum deflections and tension/stresses found in the analyses are evaluated with the respect to acceptable values. The study provides a reasonable insight into the cable-net façade systems and specifies the orientation of the full follow-up parametrical study.