Abstract

The need for facade engineers to learn the fundamentals of FEA and get certified to assess their FEA knowledge are essential and should be considered by professionals in the facade engineering industry. Facade engineers are a new discipline that focuses on the design aspect of the building enclosures. They ensure that the building facade is structurally sound, weather tight, energy efficient, and provides an overall comfort to the occupants. To ensure these aspects are met, facade engineers should have the skills of structural engineers and mechanical engineers. Often facade engineers are task to analyse a rectangular cladding, say for example a glass supported on four sides by a frame, to ensure the facade is adequate against the worst-case conventional load (eg: wind load). They may also require to conduct a thermal calculation of the glass facade to ensure it satisfy the building regulations in their country. To do this, facade engineers will often conduct a simulation using FEA to analyse that the maximum stress in the glass is within the allowable load or to check that the thermal conductivity of the glass is within the limit of the building regulations. However, conducting a simple analysis in FEA could also mislead facade engineers with their limitation in terms of FEA. FEA are often thought as a software where if a user knows which button to click, then they can be considered as a FEA user without understanding the fundamentals such as proper boundary condition, aspect ratio in plate elements, singularity, meshing, etc. In addition to structural requirements, it is often required by many international standards, such as AS1288 in Australia, to conduct a nonlinear analysis when analysing a glass. In addition, thin plate members with deflection greater than half of its thickness are well analysed using geometric nonlinear analysis and solving the differential equation of nonlinear problem are complex and necessitate the use of FEA.