Notched response of OSB wood composites

Oriented strand board (OSB) is a form of wood composite manufactured from long, narrow strands bonded together with resin under heat and pressure. A large experimental database is gathered here that shows that OSB can be considered a notch-insensitive material thanks to its heterogeneous nature. Notched tensile strength does not decrease with hole size for hole diameters tested, and that for low to moderate hole sizes failure often occurs in the gross section away from the hole. The existence of an intrinsic material stress concentration is suggested, based on the existence of a constant characteristic dimension, and probabilistic considerations are used to gain insight on the observed behaviors. Scaled-up unnotched and notched specimens tend to fail at lower applied stress, but follow similar overall behavior.