Round cables are in use for a long time now but if you’re looking out for cutting edge performance, reliability, packaging then using a flat cable is a good idea. Well, flat cables come with a plethora of benefits, one vital being flexibility in motion which is of great use in areas like robotics, automated medical diagnostic equipments or more.
Flat cables are better because conductors flat cables are aligned on a flat plane and have the ability to offer upto 15 million flex cycle life. While round cables corkscrew or kink under repeated bending cycles thus reducing life span and leading to failures. Here’s a look into a few benefits that flat cables offer over round cables.
Higher Capacity – Flat cables offer higher current carrying capacity as compared to the round cables as they come with a higher surface to volume ratio. It thus offers a higher heat dissipating efficiency as well.
Light Weight – The flat cable configuration is so strong in mechanics that it nullifies the use of large conductors for strength. Besides, fillers tapes and other unnecessary insulating is also eliminated.
Space Saver – As compared to round cables flat cables occupy half of the space because of its shape.
Consistent Electrical Characteristics – The electrical characteristics like inductance, cross talk, time delay, impedance and more remain consistent in a flat cable as its cable geometry is constant and conductor spacing is also fixed.
Decreased Skewing Effect – The consistent and continuous dielectric besides perfect electrical and physical length in flat cables minimizes the time delays between signals
Better Handling – Due to the ability of the flat cable to decrease the number of separate conductors to be managed, disparate conductors including shielded and non shielded for signal and power as well as twisted pairs and single conductors are combined in one flat cable itself thus ensuring better organization and handling.
Many of the benefits that flat cables offer over round cables is not known to engineers on an average. Apparently, flat cables can undoubtedly resolve many design challenges which round cables fail to.
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