Chainflex® cables - igus® - #49

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Example 13: tested live! Container crane at 50 m travel distance In the crane engineering industry, energy supply systems prove their technical and economic strengths more and more frequently. Flexibility, variability, and space-saving installation are only a few of the most important criteria. An important building block of an energy supply system has to do with the cables. Here, users expect a high degree of operational reliability. In the Chainflex® laboratory, igus® cables undergo constant tests which can be used to obtain important information on the service life of a cable and to derive improvements for the future structural design of the cable. However, the situation becomes very exciting if you get the rare opportunity to remove cables from their real, tough applications and can inspect them. Current inspection The Chainflex® cable CF9.60.05 has been used in container cranes for many years; in the case presented here with a total travel distance of approx. 47 m. An inspection contract commissioned by the owner-operator was to present a performance balance sheet after more than 40.000 chain kilometres and determine the date from which the next preventive maintenance work for the other equipment should be taken into account. Following the removal of the CF9.60.05, inspections were performed with the following objectives: 1. outer jacket, abrasion behaviour, other damage; 2. overall stranding, insulation behaviour of the individual cores; 3. litz wire structural design, number of any possibly individual broken wires which might be an indication of an early failure of the entire cable. An igus® energy supply system with a length of approx. 26 m in a stainless steel trough with middle band support. 46