Designing a Safe Glass Floor A glass floor is a glass surface that people will walk on: even the slightest oversight in design can have serious consequences. This guide is intended as a summary of the key points to consider when designing glass floors. Topics covered: number of glass layers, choice of heat treatment based on the interlayer, risk of breakage due to impacts from hard objects (hard body impact), risk of falls due to slipperiness, spacer between glass and structure (flexible strip on the perimeter), impact of notches in the glazing, and rigidity of the supporting structure. STRUCTURAL SAFETY Redundancy... how to ensure safety in the event of breakage? Glass is a fragile material with variable mechanical properties. It can therefore break without warning. Unlike a self-supporting glass railing, a glass floor cannot be made of laminated glass consisting of only two layers. To comply with standards—unless specific testing is conducted—the glass floor must be laminated with at...

Just because a rectangular guardrail panel works doesn’t mean that a shaped glass panel (parallelogram) of the same dimensions and composition will work. The proof in numbers: Here we will look at a finite element analyses of a 1200 mm-wide panel with a base shoe and a Taper-Loc®-type anchor or equivalent. Critical scenario: Standards require that one or two adjacent panes be considered broken during the analysis according to the applicable standard. We therefore conducted our analysis assuming one broken pane. ↑  Rectangular railing : 105 MPa ↑  Stair railing, same dimensions : 136 MPa Glass used for stair railings is therefore about 30% more critical , due to its geometry (136 ÷ 105 = 1.295). Conclusion : For a glass railing, it is possible that a particular glass thickness will work for a rectangular shape of a certain size but will not work for a parallelogram-shaped stair glass panel. Of course, the percentage difference will depend on the glass composition (thickness), t...