“A material's toughness determines if it is suitable to be reused for production or to improve its manufacturing quality for their end-product.”

Pendulum Impact testing is a type of mechanical testing used to study the toughness of a material to check the product's ability to absorb impact and to analyse the deformation process before fracturing (by using a falling pendulum weight or striker to determine a product's ductile to brittleness *).

*Common brittle testing samples are glass, wood, plastic, paper and dried clay (low toughness and can be deformed easily) while duxtile items are aluminium, copper, tin, mild steel, platinum and lead (high toughness and will not fracture easily).

Benefits of Pendulum Impact Testing

Determine the material's ability to absorb energy during a collision by testing raw materials and molded components for strength and durability.
Understand the impact strength, anti-fracture, impact resistance, degradation, damage of the materials and a product's lifetime responses to wear & tear.
Prevents the future production quality failure (provide analysis for future designs)
Investigate batch quality during the raw material’s creation.

Common pendulum impact test methods :

Both testing methods are used to check the impact resistance with the pendulum method but with some differences.

Charpy impact testing

Test materials are placed horizontally
Hammer strikes at the middle point of the notch (surface) but in the opposite direction.
Can test on metals, plastics and polymers.

Izod impact testing