Splitting behaviour of timber loaded perpendicular to the grain by punched metal plates

Nowadays, prefabricated timber trusses are widely used as load-bearing roof structures. The majority of these trusses are produced with punched metal plates (PMP) to connect two or more timber elements of the same thickness, see Figure 2. In these structures sufficient overlap is required to prevent splitting cracks due to loads perpendicular to the grain. In the United Kingdom an extensive research on PMP connections has been conducted in the last decade to evaluate the perpendicular-to-grain load-bearing capacity. Based on these results several researchers have proposed new design code rules, however, these results can be questioned. In this paper a new set of experimental data is evaluated and compared with the U.K. data. Comparison of existing models with respect to their prediction ability shows all investigated models perform comparable, i.e. classification depends on the statistical measure used to classify prediction ability