Computerized impact test machine

Abstract

The pendulum impact test machine is a device used to measure material’s toughness by measuring the energy absorbed to fracture the specimen, the importance of this kind of test appears in many fields such as ship design, automotive design and heavy duty industries. The machine consists of a hummer raised to an initial height (H1), then released in free fall and hits the test specimen to be fractured; the hummer rise (H2) after impact is measure by a rotary encoder attached to the hummer axis of rotation, the microcontroller computes the impact energy by subtracting the potential energy before and after impact. Since material’s toughness change with temperature, an electronic controlled electrical furnace is designed to accompany the machine in order to allow the user to test the effect of temperature on toughness of the material under consideration. The overall machine is controlled and monitored by a control panel that includes an arduino microcontroller to execute the mathematical operations for computing the impact energy and controlling the furnace temperature, a keypad to allow the user to set the parameters of the experiment, and an LCD to display the set parameters and experimental results.