Novel Purity Scanner to Minimize Cable Breakdowns

Cable breakdown can cost you your customer. This is especially true for demanding applications, such as high and extra high voltage underground and submarine cables. The most common reason for a cable breakdown is impurities in the XLPE insulation, which is one of the main raw material for this type of cables. To put it in short, the purer the material, the lower the risk of a breakdown.

More reliable XLPE cables, less lifetime costs for your customer

Durability is in the core of Maillefer quality. That is why we felt the need to develop a system, which reliably detects and sorts out contaminants from XLPE pellets. We partnered with Sikora and developed the novel Purity Scanner.

The Sikora Purity Scanner increases your high and extra high voltage XLPE cable reliability, quality and safety. It inspects the XLPE pellets for purity before they get into the extrusion process. With the Purity Scanner you can reach even the strictest local standards of cable compound purity, detection of contaminants down to a size of 50 µm.

Checking every pellet inside out

Currently installed devices use optical and random measuring principles for pellet contaminations. With this method, only part of the pellets is inspected. Impurities inside the pellets remain undetected.

The new Purity Scanner uses an X-ray camera to pinpoint any inside contaminated pellets, and an optical camera to detect organic contaminants such as oxidized PE on the surface of the pellets.

With or without a cleanroom

The risk for a cable breakdown is even higher, when impurities from the environment which does not fulfill cleanroom conditions, contaminates the material. The Purity Scanner has a special sophisticated pellet transportation system with a vibrating channel, a hermetically closed transport slide, and a Fan Filter Unit (FFU, HEPA) to preserve cleanliness, when a cleanroom is not available.

Integrate and test!

The Purity Scanner can be integrated in Maillefer’s continuous vulcanizing (CV) lines EPL 30, EPL 50 and EPL 51 for MV, HV & EHV XLPE insulated cables.  

The Purity Scanner is installed inside an ISO 6 class cleanroom at Maillefer’s R&D center for Wire & Cable application customer tests. You are welcome to validate the Purity Scanner performance in practice!

Timo Mäkelä
Process Specialist, MV&HV Cable Solutions
timo.makela@maillefer.net

P.S. Please do not hesitate to contact Dr. Mikko Lahti, phone +358 40 524 8854, for testing arrangements.