Safety first

Having secured a major order to supply its new high voltage Centaur cleats for a large cable infrastructure project in the North of England, Ellis Patents invested £70,000 in a Hurco vertical machining centre to speed production.

The 8.7 tonne, 40 taper, 10,000rpm machine automates what was previously a largely manual manufacturing process, cutting the time to produce the aluminium cleats from 12 to three minutes per piece.

Richard Shaw, managing director of Ellis Patents, reveals: “When we launched the Centaur cleat in 2008, we anticipated a need to upgrade our machinery to cut production time should a sufficiently large order come in. We therefore had looked into the options available and budgeted accordingly. In fact, the only thing we didn't anticipate was just how quickly we would need a machining centre.”

Hurco's proprietary WinMax control is ideally suited to both prototyping and production work. This, plus the 21kW spindle power and 1,270mm x 660mm x 610mm capacity of the VMX50m, made the machine selection an easy decision, according to Mr Shaw. The production set-up includes a Nikken CNC260 fourth axis and MicroLoc fixturing system to reduce the number of set-ups for each component.

The Centaur range of heavy-duty extruded aluminium saddle cleats was developed by Ellis Patents in 2008 to restrain high voltage cables up to 400kV with a diameter range of 100mm to 160mm. It fills a gap in the market that the company felt presented serious safety risks.

“What spurred us on to develop the Centaur cleat was that most projects involving cleating large high voltage cables were designed on a case by case basis,” explains Mr Shaw. “As a result, there were a very limited number of suitable products available and no published data to say that any of them had been short circuit tested.”

What this meant was that specifiers were left to rely on manufacturers' warranties, which are based purely on calculations and mechanical tests, and there was no way of knowing if the cleats being used would be able to withstand the most demanding elements of the job for which they had been purchased.”

Ellis Patents rectified the situation by putting the Centaur cleat through the most rigorous of testing procedures. Using cable manufactured by ABB in Sweden, the company shipped its Centaur saddle cleats to the Netherlands where the product was tested to 163kA peak and 63 kA RMS for one second, in both three phase and phase to phase fault scenarios.

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