Test equipment - impacting device

It's already 10 years ago. I built a test equipment at my friend's request. He was a material engineering PhD candidate and needed an equipment that could apply repeated and consistent impact on a sample surface. He also asked that the intensity and rate of the impact should be adjustable.

So I devised this device:

1. The electromagnet (EM) header first picks up a steel bearing at a time, and drops it onto the surface of the test sample. The impact intensity can be adjusted by changing the height of the EM header and the period is programmable at the host PC.
2. The steel bearings are reclaimed after the impact and raised to the upper repository to get ready for the next drop.
3. Experimental data is collected by the sensor module and analyzed at the host PC.

The EM header is an air core electromagnet, which has minimum effect of residual magnetism and housed within a PTFE case.