Stiff, strong and tough laminated glasses with bio-inspired designs

Glass is an attractive material with outstanding transparency, hardness, durability and chemical stability. However, the inherent brittleness and low toughness of glass limit its applications. Overcoming the brittleness of glass will help satisfy the rapidly increasing demands of glass in building materials, optical devices, electronics and photovoltaic systems, but it has been a challenge to create glass that is stiff, strong and tough while maintaining its transparency. In this study we explore how the basic design of laminated glass can be enriched with bio-inspired architectures generated with laser engraving. We assess the performance of designs based on continuous plies (90° cross plies, Bouligand), finite glass blocks (segmented Bouligand, nacre-like brick-and-mortar) and hybrid designs. It shows that simultaneous improvements of stiffness, strength and energy absorption upon continuous ply designs can be achieved by promoting delocalized shearing of the polymeric interlayer over brittle fracture of the glass building blocks, and by only placing enriched architectures under tensile deformation so that interlayer shearing can be realized. This principle can be realized simply by adjusting size and arrangement of the building blocks, and by combining continuous plain layers with architectured layers.