Aluminum is a good conductor of electricity. In car manufacturing, this lightweight material is increasingly replacing copper in many applications involving current conductors. And aluminum has two big advantages over copper: It reduces the cost of materials and is considerably smaller in mass.
Aluminium has many advantages
The weight of a mid-range car can be reduced by two to three kilograms with the use of aluminum cabling, which in turn decreases fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
Besides satisfying the demands of lightweight construction, the substitution of copper conductors with aluminum ones also meets specifications on the availability of material. Despite these pluses, aluminum has several characteristics that makes its use as a conductor material difficult:
- Less strong than copper
- Creeps if subject to mechanical stress and at much lower temperatures than copper
- Electrochemical corrosion
All in all, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages with regard to a bright future for aluminum as a cabling material.
Fully automatic processing
Komax Wire is your partner in the fully automatic processing of aluminum cable. After all, the processing of aluminum on fully automatic crimping machines poses a number of special requirements for overall processing:
- Purity, cleanliness (no mixing of aluminum and copper)
- Gentle feeding of conductors
- Straightening of aluminum strand
- Cutting and stripping with special blades
- Conductor positioning in the crimping tool, high level of repeatability
- Cut monitoring with automatic conductor detector (ACD)
- Stripping monitoring with strip quality check (SQC)
- Crimp monitoring system with crimp force analysis (CFA)