Influence of the shape of reinforcing window profiles on the strength and torsional stiffness of windows

Leading European manufacturers of profiles intended for the production of construction joinery currently use mainly PVC profiles with various configurations of external and internal shapes, allowing the production of functional products due to their intended use, shape, possibility of building them, maintaining color and maintaining low thermal transmittance coefficients of profiles. It is important to obtain high cross-sectional strengths, especially for torsion and bending. It is related to high wind loads of structures. A profile is made of a PVC with a low Young’s modulus compared to other materials, and thus it has low stiffness and strength indicators. This leads to relatively easy deformation of the joinery profiles during assembly. To avoid this unfavorable effect, the PVC profiles are reinforced with steel sections. Currently, in the industry producing PVC profiles, open steel reinforcement profiles are almost exclusively used. This solution is very disadvantageous for reasons of stiffness. However, manufacturers use such profiles primarily for technological and price reasons. Closed profiles pose many technological problems in their production and are approx. 30% more expensive compared to the corresponding open profiles. This paper presents research on the use of closed steel stiffening sections in place of open profiles. The main advantage of stiffening closed profiles is many times greater bending and torsional stiffness compared to open profiles. The theoretical and experimental studies carried out for selected cross-sections have shown that the stresses in a closed profile are several times lower than in an identical open profile, and the torsional stiffness of a closed profile is even several dozen times higher than that of an identical open profile.