Ellis Patents, York, UK, has developed a range of extruded aluminum saddle cleats designed specifically to restrain high-voltage cables up to 400 kV with a diameter range of 100 mm to 160 mm. The Centaur line of heavy-duty extruded aluminum saddle cleats was designed specifically to fill a gap in the market that presents serious safety risks.

Ellis Patents has rectified this issue by putting the Centaur cleat through the most rigorous of testing procedures. Using cable manufactured by ABB, Ellis Patents shipped its Centaur saddle cleats to the Netherlands, where the product was tested to 163 kA peak and 63 kA root-mean-square for 1 second in both 3-phase and phase-to-phase fault scenarios.

Cable cleats are designed to fix, retain and support cables. In addition, where short-circuit faults are anticipated, correct cleating will result in the containment of the cables during a fault and enable the circuit to be restored once the fault has been repaired. When adjacent cables carrying three phase current suffer a short circuit fault, the induced magnetic fields result in the cables experiencing significant opposing forces, a safe installation requires well designed and thoroughly tested cable cleats.