All aboard!

Have you ever been to Placa de Catalunya in Barcelona? Perhaps you even got on the light rail there? Then you have probably used the Metro del Valles - a line that will also serve the Catalonian industrial city of Sabadell in the future. In order to cope with the increasing number of passengers, the operator of the line - the Catalan railway company Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC) - has ordered 15 new electric trains. The Spanish train manufacturer Stadler Rail Valencia.
 
Stadler, in turn, has commissioned Masats to build passenger doors. The company has been developing pneumatic and electric doors for public transport for years, including step ramps that adapt to different platform heights. Masats will produce 360 doors at its plant in Barcelona. And the same applies to every door: space is at a premium. Compactness is key. The doors should also be as durable and low-maintenance as possible so that the trains can be operated with maximum productivity.

"The supplier must be part of the solution"
The engineers therefore set out to find space-saving, durable and 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, Electrical Engineer at Masats. The engineers finally found what they were looking for in Cologne, at igus®, a specialist that has been developing a range of cables for use in permanently moving machine and automation components under the name chainflex® since 1989. A programme that has grown to over 1,350 different cables over the years. From this selection, the experts at Masats opted for control cables from the CF9.UL series.

The cables have a bending factor of 5xd, but are nevertheless robust and durable. Thanks to their special design. The stranded wires are made of bare copper wires with a particularly high bending strength. The cores are insulated with a mixture of thermoplastic elastomers (TPE), the cores are stranded in one layer with a short pitch length. "Thanks to this design, the control cable allows us to work with an extremely small bend radius of just 20 millimetres," says Lucena. "The cables are therefore ideal for our passenger doors, which are among the most space-saving systems on the market."