Design Criteria for Blast Resistant Thermally Tempered Glazing,

Historical records of explosion effects demonstrate that blast-propelled glass fragments from failed windows are often a major cause of injuries from explosions. Also, failed window glazing often leads to additional injuries as blast pressure can enter interior building spaces and subject personnel to high pressure jetting, incident overpressure, secondary debris impact and thrown body impact. These risks are heightened in modern facilities, which often have large areas of glass. Guidelines are presented for the design, evaluation, and certification of fixed or non-openable windows to survive safely a prescribed blast environment described by a triangular-shaped pressure-time curve. Window designs using monolithic unlimited thermally tempered glass based of these guidelines can be expected to provide a probability of failure equivalent to that provided by current safety standards for safely resisting wind loads.