It's the thickness of a single solid glass pane that would behave the same way as your laminated build-up under load. Because the interlayer lets the glass lites shear relative to each other, a laminate doesn't act as one solid piece; effective thickness captures that behavior as one equivalent number you can use in design checks.
Enter your glass build-up (each lite thickness and the interlayer type and thickness), the panel width and height, and your support and load case, along with temperature and load duration. The Saflex Laminated Glass Calculator returns stress and deflection effective thickness for that configuration, aligned with EN 19100-2, and generates a PDF report. It's designed to give a defensible, standards-based answer in under a minute.
Because the equivalent thickness that correctly predicts bending stress in the glass is generally not the same as the one that predicts panel deflection. Using a single value for both would misstate one of them. The tool reports both, side by side, and flags the closest supported match.
Results are aligned with EN 19100-2.
Yes. The stiffness of the interlayer depends strongly on temperature and how long the load is applied — a short wind gust load at low temperature behaves very differently from a sustained load in summer heat. That's why the tool asks for both temperature and duration: they change the interlayer's shear contribution and therefore the effective thickness.
Architects, specifiers, facade engineers, glass processors, fabricators, and distributors — anyone who needs a quick, standards-based effective thickness answer without specialist structural software.
Yes. The tool includes a comparison against Saflex Clear (R series) and Saflex Structural (DG), so you can see how interlayer choice affects the effective thickness of your build-up.
No. It's designed to support engineering judgement, not replace it, and its use does not constitute engineering certification. It gives you a fast, standards-based result to inform design decisions and conversations.
Laminated build-ups, with multiple glass lites combined symmetrically or asymmetrically with Saflex interlayers, across one-, two-, and four-side support conditions with the corresponding load cases.
A branded, traceable, timestamped report containing the effective thickness results for your configuration.
The Saflex Laminated Glass Calculator is free to use online. You provide a few contact details when you generate a PDF report.