7 COMMON CABLE MANAGEMENT MISTAKES When laying cables and hoses in cable carriers and e-chains, there are a number of common mistakes that are unwittingly made that can have an adverse effect on efficiency and reliability.
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o prevent unnecessary downtime, your cable management system must be correctly specified, designed and installed. Simple considerations in the beginning can prevent large problems — such as loss of continuity, insulation damage, mechanical deformation or EMI problems — later on. Modern cable carriers can withstand longer travels, faster speeds and higher loads than ever before. Such advances in automation technology mean that certain rules of thumb, such as filling only as much as 80% of a cable carrier’s cross-section, have become outdated. For this reason, below is a list of seven common cable management mistakes that you may not know you’re making, as well as how to avoid them.
1. Lack of interior separation Interior separators and shelves are crucial for keeping similar cables and hoses compartmentalised. When separation is not
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used, cables can cross over one another and become tangled. The clearance height of a compartment with several cables and hoses shouldn’t amount to more than 1.5 times the diameter of the largest cable or hose. Cables with wide differences in diameter should be laid in separate compartments. Cables and hoses with incompatible jackets should also be separated (see point 6 for more on this). The maximum cable or hose diameter corresponds to the inner height of the selected cable carrier, with additional minimum clearance. We recommend leaving a 10% clearance surrounding electrical cables, and 20% clearance surrounding hydraulic hoses. The faster and more frequently a cable carrier operates, the more important the exact positioning of the cables and hoses inside. For high-speed applications over 50 cm per second, or for high-cycle applications with over 10,000 cycles per year, cables or hoses must not be laid on top of one another without horizontal separation.
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