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.
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.
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.
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.