Ellis Patents has raised the industry bar by developing a range of extruded aluminium saddle cleats designed specifically to restrain high voltage cables up to 400kV with a diameter range of 100 to 160mm.
The Centaur range of heavy-duty extruded aluminium saddle cleats was designed specifically to fill a gap in the market that Managing Director, Richard Shaw, felt presented serious safety risks.
“At present neither the British nor European Standards take into account cleats on cables of this size,” he explained. “As a result, those specifying for such jobs are very much in the hands of the manufacturers, who in most cases simply provide warranties for their products.”
Ellis Patents has rectified this issue by putting the Centaur cleat through the most rigorous of testing procedures. Using cable manufactured by ABB in Sweden, the company shipped its Centaur saddle cleats to the Netherlands where the product was tested to 163 kA peak and 63 kA RMS for one second, in both 3 phase and phase to phase fault scenarios.