  Laminated glass structures are formed by stiff layers of glass connected with
a compliant plastic interlayer. Due to their slenderness and heterogeneity,
they exhibit a complex mechanical response that is difficult to capture by
single-layer models even in the elastic range. The purpose of this paper is to
introduce an efficient and reliable finite element approach to the simulation
of the immediate response of laminated glass beams. It proceeds from a refined
plate theory due to Mau (1973), as we treat each layer independently and
enforce the compatibility by the Lagrange multipliers. At the layer level, we
adopt the finite-strain shear deformable formulation of Reissner (1972) and the
numerical framework by Ibrahimbegovi\'{c} and Frey (1993). The resulting system
is solved by the Newton method with consistent linearization. By comparing the
model predictions against available experimental data, analytical methods and
two-dimensional finite element simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed
formulation is reliable and provides accuracy comparable to the detailed
two-dimensional finite element analyzes. As such, it offers a convenient basis
to incorporate more refined constitutive description of the interlayer.
