The Engineer's Guide to Custom Cable Design
Featured Product from Northwire, Inc.
The Engineer’s Guide to Custom Cable Design
Custom cable design can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you are like many and left the cable and connector design until the end of the project. There are many different factors that can affect material selection and many different materials to choose from! So how or where does someone even start with designing a custom cable or complete connectivity solution for a specific end application?
As with any project, a requirements gathering session is imperative to designing the right solution for the needs of your device or application. Having an understanding of the application and the environment it has to perform in will help the cable design engineer choose the appropriate components and cable materials.
Requirements Gathering
- Identify End Application
- Application’s Environment
- Time
- Temperature
- Frequency
- Concentration
- Critical-to-Quality Characteristics
- ‘Needs’ vs. ‘Nice to Haves’
- Flexibility vs. Flex Life Expectations
- Flexibility – suppleness, a measure of how much movement a cable can tolerate at a given time
- Flex life – how often the cable will need to flex
Another important aspect of the initial design consultation will be to get an understanding of any existing pain points or performance failures that are occurring, assuming the opportunity is to improve an underperforming design.
If working on a brand new project, a prototyping phase may be necessary to ensure that the cable solution is performing as expected in the real world environment.
No matter where you are at in your project, whether an existing or new solution, it is recommended to partner with a cable design engineer to ensure your application requirements are met, but we designed this White Paper to help get you thinking about the different factors that may affect design and material selection to get you started on the right foot.
Follow us on:
Northwire, Inc.
Northwire, Inc. celebrates 50 years as an innovator in wire and cable manufacturing and interconnectivity solutions for medical device / life science, robotics, industrial, off-road heavy equipment, aerospace, defense, and test and measurement applications and more.
Northwire design engineers partner with companies of all sizes to develop custom cable solutions. We help you select the right materials and cable configurations for your environment as well as work through your application requirements and agency compliance.
Northwire, Inc
Northwire, Inc. is your responsive partner for developing and manufacturing customized technical cables, coil cords and complete interconnectivity solutions.
