Pendulum impact testers for determining impact strength

What is a pendulum impact tester?

Pendulum impact tester by Hegewald & Peschke

A pendulum impact tester is a testing machine used to determine the impact toughness of materials. It measures how much energy a material can absorb during an impact load before it breaks. The measured impact energy provides important information about a material’s behavior under dynamic stress and allows conclusions to be drawn about its toughness, robustness, and resistance to fracture.

Impact toughness testing plays a particularly important role where components are exposed to high loading rates or must function reliably under shock and impact loads. Typical application areas include automotive engineering, aerospace, mechanical engineering, the plastics industry, as well as materials development and quality assurance.

How Pendulum Impact Testers Work

The pendulum impact tester consists of a pendulum hammer that strikes a standardized specimen from a defined height at a specified velocity. When the specimen breaks, part of the kinetic energy is absorbed.

The impact energy absorbed by the material is calculated from the difference between the initial energy and the residual energy remaining after penetration. The higher the absorbed energy, the higher the impact toughness of the material is generally considered to be.

Modern pendulum impact testers can also be equipped with instrumented pendulum hammers. These record force-time and force-deformation curves during the test, thereby enabling a significantly more detailed analysis of the fracture process.

Advantages of the pendulum impact test

Accurate assessment of material behavior under impact loading
Rapid and standards-compliant determination of impact strength
Suitable for research, development, and quality assurance of materials

Pendulum impact testers from Hegewald & Peschke

The pendulum impact testers from Hegewald & Peschke enable the precise determination of impact toughness and impact energy in metals, plastics, and other materials. Their high-quality, vibration-damping machine design ensures maximum stability, high measurement accuracy, and a long service life. Combined with a wide range of accessories, intelligent data acquisition, and sampling rates of up to 10 MHz, these systems ensure reliable, reproducible, and standards-compliant test results.

The accompanying evaluation software offers a powerful solution for the acquisition, evaluation, and documentation of measurement data from instrumented impact tests. In addition to a clear graphical display of measurement curves, the software features integrated evaluation algorithms for the automatic analysis of test data in accordance with DIN EN ISO 14556. Furthermore, it enables the convenient creation of test reports as well as statistical evaluations of the measurement results.

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Pendulum impact tester PSd 50

Pendulum impact testers with a working capacity of up to 50 J

The PSd 50 pendulum impact tester enables the precise determination of impact toughness and impact energy with a working capacity of up to 50 J. The system is suitable for numerous standard-compliant test procedures on plastics, adhesive bonds, and other materials and is used in research, development, and quality assurance.

Detail

Pendulum impact tester PSd 50 (722 KB)

Pendulum impact tester PSd 450

Pendulum impact testers with a working capacity of up to 450 J

The PSd 450 pendulum impact tester was developed for the precise determination of impact toughness and impact energy in metals and other materials. With a working capacity of up to 450 J, the system is particularly suitable for Charpy-type notched impact tests on metals as well as for instrumented impact tests in accordance with international standards.

Detail

Pendulum impact tester PSd 450 (640 KB)

Pendulum impact tester PSd 750

Pendulum impact testers with a working capacity of up to 750 J

The PSd 750 pendulum impact tester is a high-performance testing machine designed to determine impact toughness and impact energy on standardized specimens and test bars. Depending on the test requirements, pendulum hammers with a work capacity of 600 J or 750 J can be used. It is particularly suitable for demanding notched impact bending tests on metals in research, development, and quality assurance.

Detail

Pendulum impact tester PSd 750 (723 KB)

What types of pendulum impact tests are there?

Depending on the material, application, and test objective, different impact testing methods are used. While some methods were developed primarily for metals, others are particularly suitable for plastics, adhesive bonds, or composite materials.

Charpy impact test

Graphical illustration of the Charpy test

The Charpy impact test is the most commonly used method for determining impact strength. In this test, the specimen is positioned on two supports and subjected to an impact from a pendulum hammer at its center. The test is particularly suitable for metals and is frequently used for material characterization and quality control.

Izod impact test

In the Izod impact test, the notched specimen is clamped vertically and held at only one end. The pendulum hammer strikes the free end of the specimen, breaking it under a cantilever load. The method is primarily used for testing plastics and is particularly widespread in the Anglo-American region.

Impact tensile test

Graphical illustration of the impact test

In the impact tensile test, the specimen is not subjected to bending but to tensile stress. The sudden tensile stress allows conclusions to be drawn about a material’s behavior under dynamic tensile loads. This method is frequently used for plastics and highly ductile materials.

Wedge impact test

The wedge impact test is used primarily to evaluate adhesive bonds. In this test, a wedge is driven into the bonded joint at a defined speed, causing a crack to propagate. The method allows for the evaluation of the impact resistance and fracture resistance of adhesive bonds under dynamic loading.

Other impact test methods

Instrumented Notched Impact Test

The instrumented notched impact test expands upon the classic Charpy test by incorporating high-resolution force measurement throughout the entire impact process. This allows not only the impact energy but also force-time, force-displacement, and force-strain curves to be recorded. This enables a detailed analysis of crack initiation and fracture behavior, making the method particularly valuable for research and development.

In addition to the established Charpy, Izod, and impact tensile tests, there are other specialized methods for specific applications. These include, for example, puncture tests, explosion tests, Robertson and Esso tests, and the NDT tear test. These methods are primarily used in research or for specific safety-related issues.

Test Standards for Pendulum Impact Tests

Pendulum impact testing machines enable the performance of various test methods, including:

DIN EN ISO 148-1 (Notched Impact Bending Test on Metals)
DIN 53453, DIN 53753, and DIN 53448
ASTM D256 (Methods A and B)
ISO 8256 (Impact tensile test)
ASTM D4812
AFNOR NF T51-111
BS 7413
BS 2782 Part 3, Methods 350 and 359