Tested cables
What is it that we do every day in the chainflex laboratory?

igu-blog-adm | 26. June 2020

We have already written a number of articles about our test laboratory. We have also described special customer tests and shown why the laboratory is so important. Today, we will take a closer look at routine cable test operations. What is it that our colleagues do there?

Setting up our own or customer-specific experiments

Our goal is to ensure that our cables continue to keep paces with the rising requirements. That is why we have set up tests besides our own. We also use customer-specific experiments to take a closer look at our cables.

This enables us to give our customers more precise information about a cable’s service life. We reduce the danger of unplanned customer machine downtime. Tested cables not only give the customer a better feeling but verify quality and durability.

Our laboratory tests also justify our guarantee and give our customers meaningful numbers and facts. These objectives are the foundation of many experiments in our test laboratory.

For instance, we test cables in a wide variety of motion patterns, but usually linear chains. All our robot chains, on the other hand, wind up on the torsion test bench in our triflex chains.

Experiment monitoring and regular measurements

Before each experiment, we define a precise object and determine the procedure.

Our tests are subjected to fully automatic, continuous monitoring, measured values documented and results established. This ultimately gives us a clear evaluation. We’ve achieved this high degree of automation by developing AutoMess.

In addition, regular resistance value measurements are made with a high-precision Wheatstone bridge, which can measure even the smallest resistance fluctuations. But it is only necessary in experiments in which a connection to AutoMess is not helpful. This is the case for tests with a low service life goal, for instance.

Special measuring instruments are used with bus cables to determine data transmission behaviour. Resistance values by themselves are not sufficiently meaningful.

At igus, we perform hundreds of cable tests at the same time. We usually measure completely automatically so that we can cover the great demand. AutoMess is a measurement system that we developed for these requirements. It supplies millions of pieces of data to feed our service life calculator. This allows each customer to directly access our laboratory knowledge, so to speak.

Cable dissection

All tested cables are then dissected and analysed down to the smallest detail. This is how we find out which assembly was subjected to how much stress.

We can continuously document the condition of the tested cable after the experiment. This gives us not only the measured values on paper, but also optical comparisons, which help us detect changes to the cables.

All this work is done in the background, putting our sales and product management personnel in the comfortable position of being able to give our customers precise information.

You are welcome to test the data foundation in our service life calculator or talk to us about the options of conducting a very specific cable test.