Durability not only in energy chains
chainflex is robust!

igu-blog-adm | 16. April 2020

Very often we write about cable assemblies that we have optimised, so that they guarantee our cables in the energy chain a long service life. Very high quality strands in the cores can be bent superbly, our inner jackets guide the stranding constructions along the longest paths and also provide a bomb-proof foundation for the shield. This shield is also very densely braided for excellent electromagnetic compatibility performance in the most adverse interference fields. However, this durability not only applies to energy chains.

So we say with conviction: chainflex is robust!

Durability is the measure of all things in open-cast mining

Customers from a wide range of industries require robust solutions.

A perfect example of this is an application from the company RWE Power. A few years ago, we further developed our stable CFBUS bus cable series for their application.

Our customer needs bus cables in his large devices that can withstand loads because people can step on them or stones can fall on them. It must withstand these conditions and must never become the cause of a system failure.

Bus cables are the neural pathways of bucket wheel excavators. When this one comes to a standstill it gets really expensive. The inner jacket and the good braided shield really impressed our customer at that time! However, he was also looking for a flame-retardant solution due to welding work on site. Furthermore, the cable should be UV-resistant, as the plant is operated outside all year round.

Here we were able to offer a tailor-made solution with our black TPE mixture from our modular system, which has now become the corporate standard.

Forklifts like our cores wound in bundles

Our cores wound in bundles was developed years ago to permanently prevent the corkscrew in the chain. The fact that this corkscrew also occurs on a cable for a forklift, which is guided by rollers, was not known to us at that time. Thanks to close customer relations we were able to learn about this problem as well as find solutions.

In appropriate tests in customer applications we were able to prove the concept of our cores wound in bundles. In this way, it developed and provided the user with a durable solution for a large number of forklifts per year.

How much pull can I exert on a cable?

By standard this is answered quite simply: tensile force on the cable may not exceed 15N/1mm² of the main core. This applies to every cable in hanging applications, e.g. in SRUs (Rstorage andbretrievalgunits). In these applications everything always fits very well as long as you have cables with larger cross sections and the heights are not too much. For sensitive cables we have to use a supporting element, as for example in our CFSPECIAL.182.xxx. Thanks to its aramid threads, it can withstand maximum tensile forces of 15,000% above the standard. Among other things, this cable has now also proved its worth in lifts for access systems.

With a similar concept we developed sensor cables for crash test dummies in the automotive industry, where standard cables would simply break off due to the hard impact. Here, too, a supporting element is required to keep the extreme braking forces away from the cores.

So we offer many different concepts that constantly create new solutions for other sectors. chainflex offers durability not only in energy chains.

Do you also have applications where we can support and assist you? Ask and we will check what we can do for you.