All aboard!

Have you been to the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona? Maybe you even travelled on one of the light-rail vehicles there? If you did, you probably used Metro del Valles, a line that will also serve the Catalonian industrial city of Sabadell in future. In order to manage increasing passenger volumes, the line operator (Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya, or FGC, a Catalonian rail company) has commissioned Stadler Rail Valencia, a Spanish train manufacturer, to construct 15 new electric trains.
 
Stadler, in turn, tasked Masats with building the passenger doors. For years, Masats has been developing pneumatic and electric doors for public transportation, including threshold ramps that adjust to different platform heights. Masats will manufacture 360 doors at its plant in Barcelona. And each of them must take up as little space as possible. Compactness is key. The doors should be durable and require as little maintenance as possible so that the trains can operate with maximum productivity.

"The supplier must be part of the solution"
So the engineers were looking for space-saving, durable, low-maintenance components for the door-opening mechanisms. "We have high standards and expect the supplier to be part of the solution," says Alberto Lucena, a Masats electrical engineer. The engineers finally found what they were looking for in Cologne, at igus, a specialist who has been developing a range of cables under the chainflex name for use in constantly moving machine and automation components since 1989. Over the years, this undefined has grown to more than 1,350 different cables. From this selection, the Masats experts chose CF9.UL undefined.

The cables have a bend factor of 5xd while remaining robust and durable. This is due to their special structure. The stranded wires have an especially bend-resistant design consisting of bare copper wires. The cores are insulated with a mixture of thermoplastic elastomers (TPE) and wound in a layer with a short pitch length. "This design allows us to use the control cables to work with extremely small bend radii - just 20 millimetres", says Lucena. "Hence, the cables are ideal for our passenger doors, which are among the most space-saving systems on the market."