Materials testing systems manufacturer Instron has launched a new technical e-guide designed to help engineers generate reliable high-strain-rate tensile data for modern product development. The publication, Mastering impact: a modern guide to tensile impact strength testing with drop towers, explains how dynamic drop testing supports simulation accuracy and material characterisation in applications exposed to high-velocity impact events.
As electrification progresses and lightweight materials are introduced into increasingly demanding applications, greater emphasis is placed on development teams’ understanding of how components behave under rapid tensile loading.
In electric vehicle battery systems, laminated structures and thin polymer films can experience sudden strain during crash pulses. In electronics housings and structural composites, impact events may occur in fractions of a second. Material data generated at slower strain rates does not always capture the change in stiffness, ductility or crack propagation under those conditions.
When high-strain-rate behaviour is not characterised directly, simulation models rely on extrapolated quasi-static values. That can affect how failure is predicted and how safety margins are defined during validation. The guide addresses this issue by outlining how force–time data captured during tensile impact testing reveals energy absorption and crack development under realistic loading speeds.
It also explains how strain-rate sensitivity influences correlation between laboratory results and simulation outputs, and how drop weight impact testing can improve confidence in qualification programmes.
“Development teams are specifying materials for applications where loading events happen in a few milliseconds,” said Andrea Incardona, application engineer at Instron and author of the new e-guide. “Yet material data is often generated at strain rates that do not reflect those conditions.
“When that happens, engineers are forced to make assumptions inside their simulation models. High-strain-rate tensile data reduces that uncertainty. It allows teams to see how energy is absorbed and where failure initiates, which ultimately supports more confident design decisions.”
The e-guide reflects growing demand for dynamic material data as electrification and lightweighting continue to influence product design. As components become thinner and loading events more severe, high-strain-rate characterisation is becoming a routine requirement within development programmes
Engineers and laboratory managers working with strain-rate-sensitive materials can download the full guide from Instron’s website to evaluate how tensile impact testing can strengthen simulation accuracy and material qualification workflows.
Click here to download the e-guide.
