Dive summary:

• Glass walls are attractive and distinctive, but designers and building owners have to consider how much stress they can withstand and what danger they might pose if they were too weak.
• The five-story Transbay Transit Center reuse project in San Francisco will have glass walls around its more than 215,000 square feet of space and a glass-covered roof garden, which means a lot of glass to be stressed by weather or events – or even a bomb going off nearby.
• At the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, Ernst-Mach Institute in Efringen-Kirchen, Germany, researchers are using a shock tube that employs high-pressure air blasts to test the strength of various compositions.

From the article:

The principle behind it is this: the shock tube consists of a driver (high-pressure) section and a driven (low-pressure) section, which are separated by a steel diaphragm. ...