Our chocolate impact tester is a compact, easily portable pendulum-type impact tester that we use at outreach events for comparing the toughness of chocolate bars.
The toughness of a material describes how much energy an object can absorb before breaking.
For chocolate bars we can use the tester to investigate the effect the composition (e.g. white chocolate vs dark chocolate) or structure (bubbly vs solid chocolate). Another interesting material property that can be explored using the tester is the ductile – brittle transition temperature. This is when a ductile material becomes brittle at lower temperature which has bene the cause of several famous disasters such as the Space Shuttle Voyager and Titanic disasters).
Link to videos
Discover the Effect of Temperature on Materials – a video by Zac Nye (one of our ambassadors) in which he uses an outreach and a research grade impact tester
Chocolate Impact Tester – a short video of the chocolate impact tester used on the Henry Royce stand at Blue Dot 2019