A Comparative Experiment on Thermal Stress Failure of Vacuum Glazing applied in Curtain Wall at Spandrel area

Purpose: The vacuum glazing should constantly retain the gap in vacuum state to maintain high thermal performance. To do so, pillars are used to prevent the glazing from clinging to each other by the atmospheric pressure and therefore surface of the vacuum glazing is consistently affected by residual stress. The vacuum glazing could be applied to curtain wall systems at spandrel area to fulfill a rigorous domestic standard on U-value of the external wall. However, this can lead to high glazing temperature increase by heat concentration at a back panel and finally thermal stress breakage. This study experimentally determined weakness of the vacuum glazing systems on the thermal stress breakage and investigated effect of the residual stress. Method: The experiment first built two scale-down mock-up facilities that replicate the spandrel area in curtain wall, and then installed single low-e glass and vacuum glazing respectively. The two mock-up facilities were exposed to outside to induce the thermal stress breakage. Result: The experiment showed that the temperature occurred the thermal stress breakage was $114.4^{\circ}C$ for the single low-e glass and $118.9^{\circ}C$ for the vacuum glazing respectively. The result also showed the vacuum glazing reached the critical point earlier than the single low-e glass, which means that the vacuum glazing has high potential to occur the thermal shock breakage. In addition, the small temperature difference between two glazing indicates that the residual stress scarcely affects breakage of the vacuum glazing.

커튼월 스팬드럴용 진공유리의 열파손에 대한 비교실험