Nowadays, many new buildings are designed with a large glass facade, also in Belgium, but are at the same time prone to terrorist attacks (embassies, Nato building, etc.). The blast design of these glass facades is therefore mandatory. However, blast design of glass facades is still mainly a matter of rules of thumb, and of experimental large-scale certification tests.

The aim of this project is to improve the fundamental knowledge on the mechanical response of glass facades to air blast loading and develop an experimental and numerical framework to assess the blast resistance of different concepts of glass facades without the need for many large-scale tests.