Drop Test

Stephen Hanly

The Test

Performing some MIL-STD-810 drop testing to evaluate a product, the standard is attached. The particular tests included in this post were dropped from 2 feet. Acceleration levels can be calculated from drop heights if the pulse width is known, the attached paper provides more details. A shock event with a 2 to 3ms pulse width, dropped from 2 feet should have between 170g and 280g peak acceleration.

The Data

The results taken from the piezoresistive accelerometer provided very clean results and was consistent with the peak levels one should expect with the known drop height and pulse width.