Sensor-Based Dynamic Response and Stress Estimation in Monolithic and Laminated Glass Beams Under Soft Impact Loading

Monolithic and laminated glass elements are increasingly used in structural applications, where their response to impact loading must be assessed to ensure safety. For soft impacts, simplified simulations based only on the initial impact velocity may be inaccurate because the transient coupling between the impactor and the glass depends on the impactor stiffness and mass. This study investigates the dynamic response of monolithic and laminated glass beams under soft impact loading using accelerometers, an instrumented impact hammer, strain gauges, operational modal analysis, and simplified finite element models. The influence of three impactor heads and three hammer masses is examined. Two approaches are assessed: a modal simulation driven by the measured impact-force history and a sensor-based method that reconstructs stresses from measured structural responses and experimentally identified mode shapes. Comparisons with experimental measurements yield approximate absolute-peak errors of 2.1% for the monolithic-beam acceleration and 1.5% for the laminated-beam stress, normalised by the maximum absolute measured response in each case, with corresponding Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.972 and 0.943. The results show that accounting for the measured impact-force history and combining response measurements at discrete locations with modal information can provide efficient estimates of dynamic response and stress without explicitly modelling the impactor-glass contact.