One cable for power and data

Motion plastics and cable manufacturer igus has introduced its new readycable hybrid cables, allowing one cable to be used for power and data, helping save installation space and weight.

igus notes that so-called hybrid technology has become one of the major trends in cable planning. While servo drive systems used to require several cables to transmit energy and data, hybrid cables combine the cores.

“We are…continuously expanding our portfolio of ready-to-connect hybrid cables from the readycable series in order to offer our customers a fast, reliable, cost-effective solution for continuous use in energy chains," says igus South Africa MD Ian Hewat.  

New to the range are ready-to-connect cables suitable for SEW-EURODRIVE with MOVILINK DDI and Siemens SINAMICS S210 with One Cable Connection, or OCC. In addition to polyurethane, the cable is also available with an outer jacket made of polyvinyl chloride.

To save project planning time, the company also provides direct links to the macros for the EPLAN Electric P8 planning software on its website. This allows the cables to be dragged and dropped into the digital cable plan as building blocks, which it says reduces cable planning time by up to 50%.

Like all cables in the readycable series, the new hybrid cables are designed with a strong outer jacket, a strain-relieved core, movement-optimised stranded wires, a stranded structure with a short pitch length and a gusset-filling extruded inner jacket.

"This design and these high-quality materials make our new hybrid cables fail-safe in continuous use in energy chains, even in compact applications," says Hewat.

Materials with good electromagnetic compatibility prevent the energy and data transmission cores from having a negative influence on each other, he explains. igus offers a chainflex cable guarantee of 36 months and also provide an online tool to calculate the expected service life of a specific application.