Impact resistance is one of the most important properties for component designers to consider, and one of the most difficult to quantify. It's a critical measure of service life and carries significant implications for product safety and liability. Instron has more than 80 years of experience designing impact testing systems that simulate real-life impact conditions.
Instron Drop Towers are used to develop, fine-tune, and validate material models under high-rate impact conditions. The new 9400 Series produces reliable, repeatable results, whether you're testing materials and components before production to improve product acceptance or testing during production to ensure continuous improvement.
Drop weight testing is commonly used across automotive, packaging, consumer electronics, and materials research applications to evaluate how a product or material responds to a single, high-energy impact event — from a dropped phone to a vehicle component in a collision. Configurable drop height and impact mass let you tailor tests to a wide range of energy levels and specimen types, supporting standards such as ASTM D3763 and ISO 6603.
Instron Pendulum Impact Testing Systems determine the impact resilience of plastics and composites safely and efficiently, complying with all major ISO and ASTM impact testing methods across an energy range of 0.5 to 50 J. They support Charpy, Izod, and tensile impact testing in both manual and motorized configurations, making them well suited to quality control and material characterization work where repeatable, standards-compliant results are essential.
Unlike drop weight testing, which simulates a single high-energy impact event, pendulum impact testing measures the energy absorbed by a specimen during fracture — a key indicator of a material's toughness and resistance to sudden loading.
All impact Instron Impact Testing systems produced from 1975. These include drop towers and pendulums, such as the Fractovis and Dynatup Series.
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