Drop Tower Testing—The next step in heavy weight impact testing

Abstract

Over the last few years, research into heavy hard impacts from fitness activities has become an active field of investigation and product development. In order in facilitate our efforts, Pliteq has built a custom drop tower capable of repeatability dropping up to 150 kg from well over 2 m height. During the impact, the force, displacement, velocity, and acceleration can be obtained. This paper will give an overview of this apparatus, the type of data that it can collect, how this data can be used to make better products and how the data can be used to predict field performance.

Further prediction of heavy weight drops on resilient sports floors in existing buildings

“…The issue of heavy weight drops in buildings has been an issue for a number of years [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Currently, the assessment of the noise and vibration due to heavy weight drops in an existing building can be quite cumbersome.…”

“…Overall, this testing regimen is quite arduous, time consuming, and not very repeatable. In recent years, the authors have built a drop tower to repeatedly test fitness flooring performance in a controlled environment [4][5][6]. This paper looks at ways to predict the in situ performance of fitness flooring by incorporating force pulse data collected from a drop tower and measured transfer functions.…”