Sometimes, the most impactful innovations begin with a challenge. This is especially true when it comes to cable design. Whether it's fitting several lines into a compact composite cable or developing a solution that can withstand the harsh conditions inside a wind turbine, custom-engineered cables often solve problems that off-the-shelf products simply can't address.
In this video, Amphenol TPC experts share stories behind custom cable designs that solved customer problems and also influenced future product developments across the industry. From advanced composite cables to specialized solutions for wind energy and pipeline inspection applications, our experts showcase how innovative engineering can transform operational challenges into long-term success stories:
Transcript:
[On-screen text: What's a custom cable we designed that became widely adopted by the industry?]
The oscillating shower cable! It's not a shower. It's not a shower, though, let's be clear. But it helps operate or provide signal and data and power and communication to a device that actually sprays down inside of a set blower system. Because of the types of components that were in it, it helped us develop other products. You know, if we know how to do communication cables very well, there's always an opportunity to add a communication cable to another cable, make it a composite, where you're building upon yourself. Here, I've got this capability, now I can take that capability, put it inside another cable that may have other stuff in it. And we've done that quite a few times, too.
There's a lot of composite cables that we have out there that either may have... I think there's one that we did fiber optic on, for sure, only one. And then we've done others where we've mixed power signal data. For instance, the one cable that I can remember was for a customer in Canada where they were stuffing all these components inside of a garden hose. And they couldn't get this thing to last over a month. And the cable itself had 144 micro coaxes. It had a water line, an air line, it had power, and it had signal. And the device that they were using was what they call a phased array ultrasonic system. It checked for cracks and welds in huge pipelines, you know, eight foot, 12 foot.
So this device would go around the pipeline at different intervals and look for these cracks and welds just to see how structurally sound the pipe was. And we were able to put that cable together in a jacket that was about... I'm going to say 30% less in diameter, and it ended up lasting them eight times longer.
Well, the one that's very similar to that in terms of the conduit almost is the wind generators. For the wind turbines! Wind turbines, yeah. That was one where you know it's just a problem a particular customer was having with a specific generator. I know Tim worked pretty hard with our supplier to develop a cable that we're still selling today. It's probably been 10 years or more that we've been selling this cable. I think all of their problems basically went away. I mean, they were amazed at the flexibility of this product and i think it just made those issues disappear. And what happened in that particular cable as well is... they had always had a problem. There's a lot of hydraulic fluid that's up at the top of these things. And they had a lot of trouble with ruptured lines. There was hydraulic fluid just going everywhere. So that was a contaminant that was getting on the cable, destroying the cable.
That was one of the conditions they were trying to avoid. The other condition was how they terminated it. They had a slip ring, but it had a very, very tight clearance. And what we did is we changed up the insulation materials on the conductors enough to make it so it was so much easier for them to bend it and get it into the proper position to terminate. So it's just a matter of "what is your issue, where is the issue, and what can we do to help you?"
Yeah. And a tangent to custom cables, you've done a lot of booster cables. Wait, booster cables? No, bolster cables. I'm sorry, cut that part out. [Laughs] With our heavy-duty reeling cable, right? That was based on the bolsters' designs. So without that you doing those cables who knows where that would have went to.