Sensitivity to intensity and distribution of the temperature field in the nonlinear thermo-mechanical analysis of laminated glass plates

Glass laminates consist of stiff glass plies permanently shear-coupled by polymeric interposed layers. When an external temperature rise occurs, the interlayers undergo a dramatic stiffness decay. As a consequence, not only the sectional warping typical of alternating stiff/soft composites is intensified, but also the overall behavior may evolve counter-intuitively. When slender elements prone to geometric nonlinearities are involved, even small thermal variations in intensity or distribution may act as uncertainty factors, strongly affecting the outcome. This paper proposes an efficient, robust, and accurate numerical framework to perform the sensitivity analysis to thermo-mechanical actions in glass plates. A large deformation isogeometric Kirchhoff-Love shell model enriched with through-the-thickness warping is employed, together with a generalized arc-length method involving a suitable temperature parameter as an additional unknown, namely the thermal amplifier or a spatial distribution coefficient. Numerical experiments are presented to highlight the effects that even small temperature variations produce on the equilibrium paths and the influence of the stiffness loss in the interlayer on the structural behavior and the accuracy of the models.