Understanding Wiring Harnesses

Consolidated Electronic Wire & Cable can assemble a variety of such harnesses, and our experts can help you determine what will fit your needs. However, if your needs are especially complex or specific, we also offer custom harnesses.

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Custom Wire Harnesses

Wires and cables are indispensable tools for a wide range of today&#;s home and industrial systems, and harnesses allow technicians to create orderly, carefully fitted wiring solutions for any type of environment. Depending on the specific needs of an application, these harnesses can be built to accommodate systems up to 600 volts (UL) or volts (military), with high performance at temperatures ranging from -65 °C (-85 °F) to 250 °C (482 °F).

When evaluating a new cable or wire harness solution, remember to carefully consider the specific environment it will be used in and the temperature and conditions it will be exposed to. Evaluate all of the different cable types you may be able to use; custom wire and cable harnesses can be crafted with nearly limitless style and material options, including:

• Wire ties
• Lacing
• Insulation materials of all kinds
• Custom colors
• Heat-shrink coatings
• Custom labeling or barcoding
• Four-color ink stamping
• Individual tagging
• Independent circuit IDs
• Polypropylene, nylon, and paper fillers
• Custom shielding

We take a strategic engineering approach to select the most ideal shielding and connectors for your application. At the same time, we take into account all applicable regulatory standards to ensure that your final harness is safe, reliable, compliant, and effective.

Other factors that bear on harness design include:

• Whether the harness will be exposed to continuous flexion

• If the harness will be used indoors or outdoors, and under what specific conditions

• How many circuits and conductors are required for the assembly, as well as their characteristics

• Level of voltage to be carried

• Potential exposures, including chemicals, corrosive fluids, weather conditions, and moisture from other sources

• Maximum, minimum, and average operating temperatures, as well as potential fluctuations

• Local safety and environmental regulations that might impact component selection, installation, and inspection

• Routing, breakouts, general shape of form

Wire Harness Applications

Since wire harnesses can be used to solve such a diverse range of interconnection challenges, they are used extensively throughout myriad industries. Virtually any industry that relies on cable arrangements can benefit from the use of wire harnesses. The following sectors, among others, often rely on wire harnesses to maximize efficiency and protect employees against the dangers of haphazard wiring:

• Aerospace.

  Wire assemblies are used in an expansive range of aerospace products, such as drones, satellites, and aircraft to facilitate the transmission of power, communication, and more.

• Automotive.

  Wire harnesses are critical for saving valuable space within automobiles within the dashboard, under the hood, lighting/signals, and more. They are also important for organizing complex wiring in such a way that technicians can easily identify their purpose.

• Medical

  . Hospitals and clinics rely on wire harnesses to organize and protect wires in and between equipment, including crash carts, diagnostic and imaging equipment, dental equipment and more.

• Telecommunications

  . Wire harnesses optimize use of space in a variety of telecommunications equipment, such as modems, routers, repeaters, and a variety of other communication and broadband equipment.

• Information technology

  . Nearly all computers, laptops, servers, and other IT technology contain wire harnesses to optimize space and organize wires for easy identification and installation by technicians.

• Construction

  . Wire harnesses are widely used within structures to provide wiring insulation and organization.

• Manufacturing

  . CNC machines and other powered manufacturing equipment rely on wire harnesses to route and organize external and internal wiring.

• Robotics and automation

  . Wire harnesses are used on most automated equipment and robotics to safely route, group, and protect critical wiring

Benefits of Wire Harnesses

Wire harnesses would not be so widely used if they didn&#;t present substantial benefits for wiring applications. Among other advantages, wiring harnesses benefit companies in the following ways:

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• Decreases cost compared to multiple individual assemblies

• Improves organization, especially when a system relies on hundreds of feet of complicated wiring

• Decreases installation time for projects involving extensive networks of wiring or cabling

• Protects conductors from the elements outdoors or from chemical and moisture exposure indoors

• Provides a safer work environment by cleaning up loose or scattered wires, maximizing space, and preventing trips and damage to wires and cable

• Enhances safety by minimizing the risk of shorts or electrical fires

• Decreases installation and maintenance time by potentially minimizing the number of connections and organizing components in a logical configuration

The many benefits of wire harnesses stem from very simple design principles. Sheathes protect wires against abrasion or exposure to hazards, minimizing the risk of workplace incidents. Connectors, clips, lacing, and other organizational strategies drastically reduce the amount of space that wiring must occupy and ensure that technicians can easily locate the components that they need. For equipment or vehicles that regularly contend with a web of lengthy wires, a wire harness is sure to benefit everyone.

High-Performance Materials

In addition to ensuring optimal organization, a high-quality wire and cable harness will provide reliable insulation and protection for the conductors within. There are many options for durable harness materials, and it&#;s important to select what is most beneficial for your needs.

Some of the most common insulator materials include:

• PVC, or polyvinyl chloride
• SR-PVC, or semi-rigid polyvinyl chloride
• Cellular polyethylene
• EPDM, or ethylene propylene diene monomer
• TPE/TPR, thermoplastic elastomers
• PE, or polyethylene
• Both low- and high-density polyethylene (LPDE and HDPE)
• Cellular, or foam, polyethylene
• PU, or polyurethane, as well as polyurethane and nylon blends
• Low-smoke plenum copolymers
• Polypropylene (PP) and cellular (foam) polypropylene
• FEP, or fluorinated ethylene propylene
• TFE, or tetrafluoroethylene
• PTFE, or polytetrafluoroethylene
• ETFE Tefzel
• PVDF Kynar
• ECTFE Halar
• IRR/PVC, or irradiated polyvinyl chloride
• XLPE, or cross-linked polyethylene
• Vinyl

In choosing between these and other options, it&#;s important to take into account environmental variables such as operating temperature and moisture. The presence of moisture, for instance, can necessitate a water-resistant material like polyethylene to avoid damage to the conductors.

Cable & Wire Harness Solutions

At Consolidated, we&#;ve been helping clients develop these solutions for more than 100 years. Our custom harnesses and assemblies can be found in a wide range of applications, and all projects are supported by our state-of-the-art production facilities.

Bearing in mind relevant industry standards and specifications such as IPC/WHMA-A-620, there are countless ways to develop a harness or assembly to meet the needs of a particular project. And with various options available for shielding, fillers, materials, identification, and style, the most efficient organizational solution for your project is simply a matter of strategic engineering.

Our current catalog includes a wide variety of robust, high-performance cable and wiring harnesses guaranteed to organize multi-wire systems across industries. Our custom harness services are tailored to each and every client, with our technicians drawing on decades of multidisciplinary experience to determine the ideal strategy for each operation. Whether your cabling is for a home appliance or a state-of-the-art aircraft, our assemblies can enhance organization and safety at a competitive price-point. 

To learn more about our custom wire and cable harness solutions and discuss how we can help with your next project, check out our comprehensive eBook, &#;Creating a Custom Cable,&#; or get in touch with our team today.

Synopsys Saber&#; is a solution of high-performance virtual prototyping tools for multi-domain power electronics design that consists of SaberRD, SaberEXP, and SaberES Designer. Saber allows an engineer to run complex simulations with varying component tolerances, generate best and worst-case results, and easily conduct &#;what-if&#; studies. Industry-leading accuracy lowers development costs by reducing the number of prototypes required.

SaberES Designer is a wiring harness tool for optimizing wiring layout, materials, and costs, and can be integrated with industry CAD systems. This software provides a solution for wiring harness design challenges to ensure data consistency, data integrity, and design validation. This solution, also called as the top-down &#;connected&#; design flow, is built on a single design ESD database shared by all teams, ensuring consistency across all parallel projects.

It allows designers to choose content and parts from approved libraries and databases, ensuring correct-by-construction design while integrating the systems. The extensive capabilities for design generation, validation, and multi-domain verification lead to higher design quality and better electrical system robustness. The top-down generative flow improves the designer&#;s productivity, saving resources and reducing TTM. The single, unified database addresses the lack of system integration in the traditional flow. By using approved parts and maintaining consistency, the integration process is much smoother. There is no &#;big merge&#; step where numerous issues are uncovered.

The top-down flow also makes it much easier to share an architecture platform and to create concurrent variations for individual design projects. The shared database represents a &#;200% design&#; in which all possible options for the electrical system exist. As designers work on a new project, they use assembly filters to create a unique product. This makes it easy to choose among the available options to create modular and composite wiring harnesses. The filters are reused throughout the development process, including generating netlists for circuit simulation, exporting data to a 3D MCAD tool, and generating the manufacturing outputs.

The database and flow are shared by a diverse group of users. In addition to the roles managed by designers, other roles include the librarian who maintains the symbols and other information in the company library, the administrator who controls which users can access and change which data, and superusers who can make fundamental changes in the architecture platform. The design flow must be highly customizable, including adding additional types of libraries and controlling data access to follow company and project policies. Superusers have a lot of flexibility in tailoring the solution to fit the needs of the other users. SaberES Designer can handle such complexity seamlessly and is the preferred wiring harness design tool used by for several OEMs.

The common database means that all changes are available to all users immediately. There is no need for time-consuming manual import or export and no risk of data corruption by external interchange formats. Informational messages about changes are sent to the users, who assess the impact on their specific areas of the design. Users are alerted when design updates are required.

The only way to avoid unpleasant surprises when physical prototypes are built is through verification using circuit simulation. The goal is to &#;shift left&#; the design process by identifying any issues at the earliest possible project stage. For SaberES Designer, the simulator is a built-in solution so that users can readily try out options and variant combinations. This improves circuit robustness and quality, and it also enables &#;what-if&#; exploration of the design space. Simulation can analyze far more design permutations than building and testing multiple physical prototypes.

This allows the designers to right-size the electrical system and load-balance across the wiring harnesses and electrical components. The built-in simulator supports the following:

• DC simulation
• DC/voltage drop analysis
• Connectivity checking
• Fuse/wire sizing checks

The built-in simulator also supports transient simulations, variation and reliability analysis for robust design, and fault analysis to meet the requirements of the ISO functional safety standard.

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