Experimental Glass Failure Data and Equivalent One‐Minute Loads

The paper examines the extent to which a procedure for calculating equivalent one-minute loads on glass panels developed by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) is consistent with results of destructive tests recently reported by the Ontario Research Foundation (ORF). The ORF tests were conducted on 107 annealed float glass panels with dimensions 1.52m × 2.43m × 6mm, simply supported on four sides. The loading rates ranged from about 0.0025kPa/s to about 25kPa/s, and the times to failure ranged from about 920s to about 0.1s. To check the validity of the NBS procedure, it is noted that if the ORF panels had been tested to failure under constant loads with one minute duration, one should expect the means and the standard deviations of the loads to be the same for various samples—to within sampling errors consistent with the sample sizes. The same should therefore be true of calculated values. Results of statistical tests are presented, from which it can be concluded with high confidence that the validity of the NBS procedure is confirmed by the ORF tests.