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Masats, a Spanish company, is developing space-saving light-rail doors with igus components

Developing compact passenger doors for new light-rail vehicles on the Metro del Valles line in Barcelona is the job of Masats, a Spanish company. To save space, the engineers used chainflex control cables and e-chains from igus in Cologne in the opening mechanisms of the doors.

Profile

What was needed: control cable
Requirements: space-saving, durable and low-maintenance components
Industry: railway technology
Success for the customer: developing compact passenger doors for new light-rail vehicles for the Metro del Valles line in Barcelona

Masats supplies durable and low-maintenance doors for trams. This allows the trains to be operated with maximum productivity. (Source: Masats)

Problem

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.

Solution

"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 product range has grown to more than 1,350 different cables. From this selection, the Masats experts chose CF9.UL control cables.

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."

Control cables can handle several million double strokes

And the outer jacket of the CF9.UL? igus uses a TPE mixture here as well.

"TPE is fundamentally a very robust material. That is why it is used in our high-end cables for especially demanding applications", says Andreas Muckes, Head of chainflex Product Management at igus. "The CF9.UL series control cables used in the passenger door-opening mechanisms can handle several million double strokes without a great deal of maintenance."
He went on to say that they are not only durable, low-maintenance and space-saving, but also meet the high safety and certification standards that apply in railway technology. "We manufacture the TPE for the outer jacket with a flame-retardant additive to produce a fireproof design", Muckes says. "The material is also resistant to oils, UV radiation and extreme temperatures of as low as -35° Celsius."
The 05 series energy chains are just as robust and compact and ensure that the control cables run safely when the doors are opened and closed - over a stroke length of 700 millimetres per door. The e-chains made of high-performance plastic have an inner height of only 10mm and an inner width of 64mm. Says Muckes, "The 05 series e-chains are ideal for applications with low inertia, for applications where space is scarce." The e-chain also enables a fail-safe and long operation. This advantage reduces the overall train operating costs.

Click here for CF9.UL

"The guarantee gives our customers a feeling of security"

There is another reason why the Masats engineers decided to use igus control cables and e-chains. igus operates a 3,800-square-metre test laboratory, in which experts test cables and e-chains under real-world conditions in a variety of movement types. The results are integrated into an online service life calculator that predicts how long the cables and e-chains will last in a given application.