The IMPETUS® pendulum can be used to conduct dynamic tests and thus velocity-dependent specimen loads. The pendulum enables the mechanical characterization of dynamically loaded material samples or small components under defined uniaxial or biaxial stress conditions. The experimental data can be directly linked to the VALIMAT® optimization environment, which provides an interface between the test data, the explicit simulation environment and a metamodel-based optimizer. By combining predefined coupon tests and defined interfaces to explicit solvers, numerical material descriptions can be automatically generated and directly validated with this process flow.