Short-circuit protection in any large scale building, such as data centres, industrial sites or enterprise needs a planned, structured, and implemented solution to ensure critical damage to power cables, building infrastructure and human life is mitigated.
Cable containment systems are crucial to reducing, and possibly eliminating, serious damage to cabling carrying high capacity power into the building’s grey space. Cables can be in single, double, trefoil or quad configuration within these environments and they need to be contained.
When there is a short-circuit event, the cables repel each other with the force of an explosion. That force can cause damage to the containment system and the surrounding area, damaging or destroying equipment and structures and even causing death to anyone in the close vicinity.
There are various methods of containing the cables to reduce and even eliminate the risk of serious damage if a short-circuit occurs. Panduit’s solutions include the traditional cleat, which is a metal or polymer containment system, and can be bulky and heavy. The size of the cleat depends on the fault current of the cable, cable size and cleat spacing. However, we also have two alternatives, a stainless steel strap and a tie solution.
There are two key benefits to our new alternative solutions; they can be much faster to install and much cheaper. Additional benefits include the ability to secure cable more often along its length, so spreading the load and reducing the likelihood of a short-circuit event breaking the cable free of its restraints.
The strap and tie solutions also allow double or possibly treble loops around the cable(s), to increase the security. Moreover, the versatility of the straps and ties allows multiple cables to be securely restrained, whereas a cleat may not allow for the cable diameter variation across multiple cables, so a larger cleat is required, which may need to be ordered, causing a delay. There is also available cushion sleeving which is required between the cable and strap or tie and if a short-circuit occurs this stops the strap cutting into the cable.
The metal ties are unique in that they have both a mechanical and have friction lock to provide a highly secure, vibration-proof closure and using the cable tie installation tool ensures the cables are contained with predetermined tension and cut leaving a clean flush edge.
Onto a topic on most people’s lips currently, sustainability. The straps and ties use far less material to produce than cleats, use far less packaging and weigh much less and take up far less space when shipping and storing, as well as offering reduced headspace when installed.
