Reliability in drive technology

The  is the largest moving cables test laboratory in the world. With 3,800m² of test area and over 800 tests running simultaneously on 64 systems, we achieve more than two billion double strokes per year to give you the highest-quality technology. 

The igus chainflex and readycable business units develop and produce cables that are sold by the metre with plug-in connectors for direct connection to electric drives. Electric drives create motion by converting electrical energy from the power grid or from a battery into mechanical energy. chainflex cables are thus the means of transport for electrical energy and set machines such as machine tools, robots, and handling machines in motion.

Single-cable solutions in drive technology

Hybrid technology has been a hot topic for several years. Machine designers obviously would like to have only one cable that carries both energy to the motor and movement data such as direction of rotation, speed, and acceleration back to the frequency inverter. In addition to saving installation space on the cable and connector, the customer also eliminates the cost of processing a second cable and of the additional material.
We take all these advantages into account in the CF220.UL.H (PVC jacket) and CF280.UL.H (PUR jacket) cable series. Here, the electrical wire/cross-section combination is constantly being expanded to be fully compatible with drives from various manufacturers, such as Beckhoff, SEW, and Siemens. We use the digit after the letter "H" in the part number to mark this affiliation to the manufacturer's requirement. The advantage for our customers is that, if the article number is identical from the "H" onwards, they can choose freely between PVC and PUR jackets without putting themselves at electrical risk. This can result in great savings.

The topic of drive cables is currently being considered in detail in our energy supply blog. There are especially many articles dealing with hybrid cables - Find out about the latest technical developments, directly from the producer!

"We need to know the expected chainflex cable service life in order to be able to reliably plan the replacement cycles. Unplanned system downtimes must not occur under any circumstances. So we would like to be able to make statements to our customers about the durability of all components installed in our SRUs."

Friedbert Dannenhauer, Deputy Head of Design at viastore on the relevance of igus online service life calculation

Customer applications for drive technology in use