Over the past five years or so, Ethernet has moved increasingly from the office environment into the industrial world – mainly for control and automation applications. But the two environments couldn’t differ more: the office environment offers its cabling system a relatively safe harbor and should a signal transmission fault occur, retries are generally acceptable. The industrial world presents a different reality: the cabling system can be integral to a harsh and hazardous environment and yet there’s no margin for error since the cables typically carry signals between devices to make events happen on a very exacting schedule.

To ensure successful Ethernet signal transmissions in an industrial environment you need high performance cables designed specifically for the environment. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Cat 5e UTP Ethernet cable just can’t stand up. It is quite fragile when compared to an industrial-grade cable, meaning that any number of stresses and challenges encountered in the industrial environment could result in one of the classic failure models: catastrophic failure, intermittent operation, incremental failure and degradation of performance. The result could be a loss of data, process downtime or a drop in the safety level of your operation. Belden’s answer is to offer a complete range of high quality, high reliability DataTuff® Industrial Ethernet cables that have been designed for industrial use and tested using state-of-the-art testing equipment. Belden DataTuff cables are also field-proven relative to exceptional day-in/day-out performance.

So, even if your cabling system is exposed to the following conditions you can turn to Belden for the right solution:

  • Oil, sunlight and gasoline
  • Temperature variations
  • Abrasion, crushing and burial
  • Flexing
  • Presence of EMI/RFI (electromagnetic interference or radio frequency interference)
  • MSHA mining approval
  • Red jackets designating safety network

For further information contact Maser Ph: 1300 130 722 or [email protected]