RS and Belden Tackle Toughest Industrial Cabling Needs

RS, a high-service global product and service solutions provider for industrial customers, offers Belden’s Alpha Wire portfolio of high-performance industrial automation cables engineered to reliably withstand extreme environments, processing requirements, and flexing cycles.

Cabling is essential to industrial automation. It’s responsible for transmitting power, data, and control signals between various components — including sensors, actuators, and controllers — and ensuring the efficient, reliable operation of automated systems. To successfully execute these various, vital roles, cabling has to ruggedly withstand environmental and operating hazards ranging from extreme weather and temperatures to shock, vibration, electromagnetic interference (EMI), high-pressure washdowns, chemicals, lubricants, oils, near-constant flexure, and even flames.

Belden’s Alpha Wire portfolio offers two expansive product lines that are purpose driven and hazard matched to satisfy all of these challenging demands: the Xtra-Guard and EcoGen series, both of which are ideal for industrial automation applications, including articulated robots with rotary joints, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), robotic arms, gantries, machine tools, and conveyors.

Alpha Wire Xtra-Guard cable is engineered to serve applications with the most rigorous requirements and extreme environments, including Class 1 clean rooms and outer space, and backed by decades of field-proven experience in addition to compliance with an assortment of UL, IEC, CE, CA, CSA, FDA, and military specifications. This range reliably withstands chemicals, solvents, acids, fuels, water, UV radiation, abrasion, burial, and temperatures extending from -80°C to +200°C and exhibits excellent flame resistance and low-smoke, low- outgassing properties. It also provides excellent signal integrity, ensuring the reliable transmission of electrical signals.

Xtra-Guard cable is highly configurable as well, offering nearly 5,000 standard constructions and one of the industry’s broadest ranges of gauges, conductor counts, and shielding, insulator, and jacket options. Options include 2–80 conductors, gauge sizes spanning 28 to 10 AWG, 300–600V ratings, Cat 5e or Cat 6A Ethernet, and moderate, continuous, and torsional flexure capabilities. Additional options include seven shielding options for exceptional signal protection against conducted or electrical noise in high- and low-frequency environments, nine jacket colors, and a variety of insulation and jacket materials, including a TPE flex cable option designed to provide the optimal mix of toughness and flexure for applications that require rolling, C flex, bending, torsion, and random motion flex.

This range is widely deployed in the automotive, industrial, machine tool, marine, medical, biotechnology, military, mining, petrochemical, semiconductor, solar, and wind power industries and well-suited for use in delta robots in addition to all the industrial automation applications also served by the EgoGen series.

Alpha Wire EcoGen cable is engineered to provide almost all of the same capabilities and options as Xtra-Guard cable and serve roughly the same applications. The primary difference is that EcoGen cable utilizes innovative, low-outgassing modified polyphenylene ether (mPPE) insulation and jacket materials free of any halogens, phthalates, and heavy metals and compliant with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directives to support customers submitting to Environmental Site Assessment (ESA) requirements.

The line’s unique, eco-friendly mPPE insulation and jacket materials also make it up to 47% smaller and 65% lighter than the Xtra-Guard range while maintaining the same electrical properties, which makes it better suited for applications with challenging space constraints.

Other differentiators include fewer jacket materials (mPPE and zero-halogen PUR), six versus seven shielding options, a single moderate flex option, operating temperatures extending from -40°C to +105°C, and a slightly narrowed scope of environmental resistance capabilities, including UV, oil, abrasion, and flame resistance and low outgassing properties.

In addition to industrial automation applications, both the Xtra-Guard and EcoGen cable series are ideal for use in energy, medical, aerospace and defense, semiconductor manufacturing, and consumer electronics applications, including photovoltaic solar panels, wind turbines, oil and gas refineries, medical robotics, cardiac catheterization labs, radiation therapy machines, wafer manufacturing and transfer systems, cleanroom packaging machines, mobile electronics, drones, and outdoor LED lighting. They’re also both available in medical-grade versions suitable for sterilization.

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