By cables for the building trade we mean what the Americans generally refer to as “building wire”. These are highly standardised products, generally small in diameter and easily sourceable from a very large number of suppliers, though this type of cable is rarely purchased by institutional customers. The key to success in this field therefore lies in optimising production costs.
In terms of technical specifications, these cables fall into three separate categories; cables for flexible conductors, largely used in Mediterranean Europe; cables for concentric conductors, which generally comprise 7 wires and are typical of countries applying British cabling standards; and cables for rigid conductors, found above-all in Germany and Eastern Europe. Building wire in Asia and the Americas tends to be similar to the Anglo-Saxon variety. With such different standards to contend with, cable producers working in this field clearly require highly specialised machinery.
Multiwire drawing lines for the 0.20 - 0.50 mm range find application in Mediterranean Europe. They are often engineered to draw a large number of wires to capitalise on the cost of investment (a 24-wire solution costs much less than two 12-wire lines); to increase productivity per unit of factory floor space; to minimise the impact of labour costs; and to optimise energy consumption, and double twist bunchers are usually installed downstream on multiwire lines of this kind. In terms of sheathing lines, the use of halogen-free, flame-retardant materials is increasingly widespread - in place of PVC materials, which, though more economical, are considered a fire hazard. As with drawing and bunching, wire is collected on large reels and fed downstream to subsequent coiling and stranding processes. In fact 0.50 or 1 mm2 single-core wire is increasingly wound onto 1250 mm reels. The 7-wire concentric conductors used in Anglo-Saxon buildings are manufactured using multiwire lines, but these are generally 14-wire solutions, which enable producers to collect 7 wires in the 0.67 mm - 1.04 mm range and above (even up to 1.35 mm) on two separate reels. With this new generation of multiwire machinery, the intermediate drawing lines once typical of the Anglo-Saxon market have become a thing of the past. In terms of sheathing, there is a growing tendency to utilise halogen-free compounds and to produce flat multi-core cables, which are unused in Mediterranean Europe. German standards require rigid conductors which are more difficult to lay in cable ducts and which do not require multiwire drawing and subsequent bunching. For this type of application Sampsistemi supplies its avant-garde tandemised stranding and sheathing line with SZ process technology (instead of closed loop stranding).
At Sampsistemi we anticipate the needs of the market, developing and supplying top quality, highly efficient lines and equipment to manufacture any type of building wire.
