Glass: Architectural and Structural Uses by Dr. Stephen Morse

About This Event

Glass has been used in buildings and architecture applications for centuries, although historically it has not been considered a material engineers use for design.  Recently, several notable building projects incorporated significant use of glass in applications beyond windows, e.g. a glass spiral staircase. Currently, engineers and architects rely on project specific testing to assess the load resistance of the glass elements used, as a national glass design standard does not exist in the United States or elsewhere in the world.  The current methods used for determining load resistance of windows and window constructions will be reviewed with a brief overview of the underlying theory and challenges facing the innovation window construction and structural use of glass will be discussed.

Dr. Stephen Morse is an assistant professor at Michigan Tech University. He has extensive experience in model scale and full-scale testing, numerical modeling and software development. His research interests include window glass strength, wind loads on structures and finite element analysis. Dr. Morse currently research interests include: the strength reduction caused by ceramic frit on glass, numerical modeling of laminated glass interlayers, strength of weathered window glass and structural use of glass. For the past ten years Dr. Morse has served as a technical adviser on the ASTM subcommittee responsible for maintaining and updating the national US window glass standard, ASTM E1300. He contributed and authored key provisions to the E1300 standard including the addition of a generalized analytical procedure, expanded NFL charts and updated examples. Dr. Morse recently became the Convener of Work Group 2 of ISO TC 160/SC 2 Strength of Glass in Buildings and a member of the US Technical Advisory Group.