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High Speed Mechanical Material Testing

Capture accurate, low-noise data in destructive material testing with HBK's renowned high-speed strain gauge DAQ solutions.
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Confidence in Every Material Test

High strain-rate material testing reveals how materials respond to the rapid loading events seen in real-world impacts, which cannot be captured with standard quasi-static tests. HBK provides reliable, high-speed measurement solutions made specifically for transient, high-frequency contexts, capturing accurate data from these critical experiments.

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Whether you need a single strain gauge or twenty real-time rosette calculations, HBK's material testing solutions are scalable from low to the highest channel counts.

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Testing new materials, such as composites, requires higher sample rates than testing traditional materials such as concrete or steel. With sample rates of up to 250 MS/s, HBK's transient recorders are ready for every new material development challenge.

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High-quality data enables you to improve the correlation between simulation models and real-world crash and impact behavior. Derive dynamic material properties and assess structural performance with confidence, enabling more informed design decisions.

Understanding Material Behaviour Under Dynamic Loads

Material properties can change dramatically at high strain rates, compared to their behaviour at quasi-static conditions. To validate design and simulation models, materials must be subjected to rapid loading, such as in crashes, impacts, or explosions. 

Examples for material testing methods:

  • Split-Hopkinson Pressure Bar (SHPB): Strain gauges on instrumented bars measure elastic wave propagation to derive the material’s dynamic stress-strain response. 
  • Charpy pendulum test: The energy a material absorbs during fracture is measured to assess its resistance to brittle failure.

Both tests are extremely short, lasting only milliseconds, and generate high-frequency signals that demand high-speed, reliable, strain-gauge-based data acquisition.

Material Testing Designed for Transient, High-Frequency Events 

HBK supports high strain-rate testing with data acquisition systems and strain measurement technology designed for highest frequencies. This helps engineers and researchers obtain accurate, usable results from every test, providing essential material data for component testing, impact simulation, and structural validation under dynamic loads.

From Test Setup to Material Model: A Complete Measurement Chain

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High-fidelity sensors capture a material's response during high-speed events.

  • HBK strain gauges mounted on incident and transmission bars for SHPB tests
  • Strain-gauge, force and displacement sensors for complex testing like Charpy pendulum
  • Trigger recognition by electrical or optical signals
  • Easy synchronisation with high-speed cameras

Genesis HighSpeed data acquisition systems capture transient, high-frequency signals with complete confidence.

  • High sampling rates up to 250MS/s
  • Low noise, high bandwidth strain gauge amplifier in renowned HBK quality
  • Triggered acquisition to RAM without aggregate sample rate limit 

HBK Perception software provides a complete workflow from setup and acquisition to final analysis and reporting.

  • Integrated tools for setup, triggered acquisition, and visualisation of dynamic strain signals
  • Advanced post-processing capabilities to calculate dynamic material properties like Young's modulus
  • Simultanous playback of strain gauge data with high speed video frames
  • Automated batch analysis to generate statistical results over thousands of test

Key Areas of Application

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Split-Hopkinson Bar Testing

Measure material behavior at high strain rates using elastic wave propagation during short-duration impact events. HBK enables accurate capture of high-frequency strain signals to derive reliable dynamic material properties.

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Charpy Pendulum Testing

Evaluate material toughness and fracture behavior under controlled impact loading conditions. HBK provides high-speed measurement solutions that help engineers accurately analyze energy absorption and failure characteristics.

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Dynamic Tensile & Compression Testing

Understand how materials respond to rapid tensile and compressive loads that occur during crashes, impacts, and other dynamic events. HBK delivers synchronized, high-speed measurements for reliable material characterization and simulation validation.

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FAQs

A standard testing machine measures material response under slow, quasi-static loading, while an SHPB test measures behaviour under dynamic conditions using wave propagation in bars. This reveals strain-rate effects that do not appear in slow tests.

The Split-Hopkinson Bar test is used to determine material properties, such as its stress-strain response, or Young's modulus, under dynamic loading by analysing elastic wave propagation in instrumented bars.

High strain-rate tests often rely on high-frequency strain measurements, using strain gauges combined with high-speed data acquisition systems and ultra-high-speed video cameras. For more complex testing additional force, displacement or temperature measurements might be needed as well. 

Impact events occur over very short timescales and contain high-frequency signal components. Insufficient sampling rates or bandwidth won't reveile the truth and lead to inaccurate results. 

High strain-rate data is commonly used to derive dynamic stress-strain behaviour and validate material models for crash, impact, and blast simulations. This requires extensive instant analysis as well as statistical analysis of whole test series.