Theoretical Principles

This chapter briefly introduces solid mechanics and optics, particularly the nature and origin of polarized light, to reveal the physical processes leading to the visibility of anisotropy effects in glass facades. The chapter concludes by presenting the fundamentals of photoelasticity, which is necessary for reproducing anisotropy effects under laboratory conditions. This chapter is based on several text books (Theocaris and Gdoutos (1979) Können (1985), Coulson (1988), Aben and Guillemet (1993), Ramesh (2000), Fujiwara (2009), Gross et al. (2017)), and papers (Illguth et al. (2015), Dix et al. (2022b)) to which the reader is referred to.