Cable Jacket Materials Compared: PVC vs PUR vs TPE vs Silicone vs XLPE

We lost a customer in 2022 over a jacket. Not over price, not over quality, not over lead time. Over a material that was on the drawing but wrong for the application, and that we built exactly as specified.

The harness was for an industrial cleaning machine. The drawing said PVC, 80 °C, 300/500 V. Perfectly normal specification. The machine ran in a food plant and got washed down twice a shift with an alkaline foam cleaner at 60 °C. Eight months later the jacket on every harness in the field had gone soft, swollen about 30 percent, and pulled back from the connectors. The plasticizer had been extracted. The plant replaced 240 harnesses, and the customer did not order again — not because we built it wrong, but because nobody in the chain asked the question that mattered.

The question was not "what material does the drawing say?" It was "what is this jacket actually going to live in?" Those are different questions, and the gap between them is where the money goes.

This article is the jacket selection conversation we have with customers, written down. It covers the seven materials that actually get used in custom harness work, what each one is genuinely good at, where each one fails, and what they cost relative to each other. It is not a materials science lecture. It is the decision table we use when a drawing says PVC and the environment says something else.

What this article covers:

• What a jacket actually does — the five jobs, and which one usually decides the material
• The seven materials in commercial use, in one comparison table
• PVC: still the default, and where it quietly fails
• PUR and TPU: the answer to almost every moving application
• TPE: the middle ground that is right more often than people expect
• Silicone: temperature and flexibility, and the abrasion you pay for it
• XLPE, FEP, and PTFE: when the answer is chemistry or heat
• Chemical resistance, material by material, against the cleaners you actually use
• Temperature: the continuous, short-term, and flex ratings that differ
• Cost: what each material adds, and when it is wasted money
• Compliance: RoHS, REACH, UL, halogen-free, and what the claims mean
• Failure modes, and the field symptoms that identify which material was wrong
• A selection decision tree you can run on your own drawing
• Why work with us

Table of Contents

1. What a jacket actually does
2. The seven materials, side by side
3. PVC: the default, and its quiet failure modes
4. PUR and TPU: the moving-application answer
5. TPE: the middle ground
6. Silicone: temperature, flexibility, and abrasion
7. XLPE, FEP, and PTFE: chemistry and heat
8. Chemical resistance against real cleaners
9. Temperature ratings that actually apply
10. What each material costs
11. Compliance claims and what they mean
12. Failure modes and field symptoms
13. A selection decision tree
14. Why work with us
15. FAQ

What a jacket actually does

Before comparing materials, it helps to be clear about what the jacket is for. It has five jobs, and they pull in different directions. Most specification mistakes come from optimising for the wrong one.

• Electrical insulation. Keep the conductor isolated from other conductors, from the shield, and from the world. This is the baseline job, and at low voltages almost any material does it. It is rarely the deciding factor — which is exactly why people stop thinking after they have satisfied it.
• Mechanical protection. Resist abrasion, cut, crush, and impact. This is the job that determines how long a harness survives on a machine, in a drag chain, or on a factory floor. It is the job most often under-specified.
• Environmental protection. Resist water, oil, chemicals, UV, ozone, and temperature. The list of specific chemicals matters far more than the category "chemical resistant," and this is where the opening story went wrong.
• Flexibility and flex life. Survive bending, twisting, and continuous movement without cracking or work-hardening the conductor underneath. Static and dynamic applications need different materials, and "flexible" on a datasheet means very little without a test condition.
• Compliance and market access. RoHS, REACH, UL recognition, halogen-free, low smoke, food contact, flame retardancy. Sometimes the material is chosen by a regulation rather than by an engineering requirement, and that is a legitimate reason — as long as you know which one is driving.

Here is the thing that matters: at 24 V DC in a dry cabinet, all seven materials work and the differences are academic. The differences only become real when one of the five jobs is being stressed. So before you pick a material, name the stress. If you cannot name it, you are not choosing — you are guessing with a datasheet.

This is the short version, organised by the application rather than by the polymer. Use it to find your row, then read the detail in the chapters that follow.

The seven materials, side by side

This is the table we keep on the wall. It compresses about forty pages of datasheets into the numbers that actually decide a specification.

Read the table as a starting point, not an answer. Every column has a caveat that the datasheet will bury in a footnote, and the two most important ones are abrasion and flex life — because those are the two that decide whether your harness survives year three. Both are also strongly dependent on formulation and construction, not just the polymer family. A good PUR is not the same as a cheap PUR, and the price difference often shows up as a difference in exactly those two columns.

PVC: the default, and its quiet failure modes

PVC is the default for a reason. It is cheap, it processes easily, it takes colour well, it is self-extinguishing in most formulations, and every harness factory in the world has it in stock. For a static harness in a dry, temperature-controlled enclosure, it is the correct answer and there is no engineering reason to spend more.

Where PVC goes wrong is not a single dramatic failure. It is a set of quiet ones, each of which takes months to appear.

• Plasticizer migration. PVC is rigid polymer plus plasticizer, and the plasticizer does not stay put forever. Heat, time, and contact with other materials drive it out. The jacket that was flexible in year one is brittle in year six — and the harness that passed every test at incoming inspection cracks when somebody moves it during a service visit.
• Chemical extraction. The opening story. Alkaline cleaners, solvents, and hot water extract the plasticizer, and the jacket swells, softens, and loses mechanical strength. In a washdown environment, standard PVC is simply the wrong material — and no amount of quality control on the assembly changes that.
• Cold embrittlement. Standard PVC gets stiff below about -15 °C. In a freezer application or an unheated outdoor cabinet in a northern winter, it can crack at a bend radius that was perfectly fine in the workshop.
• Hot-water and steam exposure. Above about 60 °C in continuous contact with water, PVC degrades faster than the temperature rating alone suggests. The rating is for dry heat, and a lot of people miss that distinction.
• Halogen content. PVC contains chlorine. In a fire it produces hydrogen chloride, which is corrosive to electronics and dangerous in an enclosed space. If your product has a halogen-free requirement, PVC is out, and this is one of the few cases where the material is decided by a rule rather than by a stress.
• Outgassing. PVC formulations can release plasticizer vapour and other volatiles. In a sealed enclosure, on an optical surface, or in a cleanroom, that film lands on things that cannot be cleaned. In audio equipment and optical instruments this is a real and repeatedly underestimated problem.

None of this makes PVC bad. It makes PVC a material with a narrow envelope, and the envelope is narrower than most drawings assume. If your harness is static, dry, indoors, between -10 and +70 °C, and not in contact with aggressive chemistry, PVC is the right answer and the cheapest one. If any of those conditions is false, you have a different problem.

Here is the check we run before accepting a PVC specification. If you can answer "no" to every line, keep the PVC and save the money. If any line is "yes," the material needs a conversation.

PUR and TPU: the moving-application answer

Polyurethane is the first material we reach for in any application where the harness moves. It has the best combination of abrasion resistance and flex life of any material on this list, and that combination is exactly what a drag chain, a robot arm, a hand-held tool, or a trailing cable needs.

The numbers that matter:

• Abrasion. PUR typically outperforms PVC by 2 to 4× in standard abrasion testing, and the gap widens in real drag-chain service where the jacket is rubbing against chain walls for millions of cycles.
• Flex life. With fine-strand conductor and a properly designed construction, PUR cable routinely reaches tens of millions of flex cycles in drag-chain service. The jacket is rarely the limiting factor; the conductor stranding and the clamping arrangement usually are.
• Cut and tear resistance. Noticeably better than PVC, which matters for cables that get dragged over edges, stepped on, or handled roughly during installation.
• Temperature. Standard PUR runs -40 to +90 °C, with 125 °C grades available. That is a wider useful range than PVC, particularly at the cold end.

Where PUR is the wrong answer:

• Continuous hot water or steam. PUR hydrolyses. In sustained hot-water immersion or frequent steam exposure above about 70 °C, PUR degrades and eventually fails — and this surprises people, because PUR is so often sold as the "washdown" material. It is the right material for splash and spray, not for continuous hot immersion.
• Strong alkalis at elevated temperature. Caustic washdown chemistry at 60 to 80 °C attacks many PUR grades. There are grades that survive it, but the grade matters enormously and the datasheet will not tell you which one you have.
• Cost. PUR is roughly 1.8 to 2.5 times the cost of PVC for the same construction. On a static indoor harness, that is money spent for nothing.
• Abrasion in some specific formulations. The generic statement "PUR is abrasion resistant" is true for good grades. Cheap PUR grades can underperform decent PVC. As with everything in this article, the compound matters more than the polymer family name.

One more thing worth knowing: PUR is available in flame-retardant halogen-free grades, which makes it the usual answer for a moving harness that also has to meet a halogen-free or low-smoke requirement. That combination — moving plus halogen-free — narrows the field to PUR and TPE almost immediately.

TPE: the middle ground

Thermoplastic elastomer sits between PVC and PUR, and it is right more often than its modest reputation suggests. It is halogen-free, it processes cleanly, it has good flexibility, and it costs less than PUR.

Where TPE is a strong choice:

• Halogen-free plus flexible, without the PUR price. If your requirement is halogen-free and the harness bends but does not run in a drag chain for millions of cycles, TPE is often the correct economic answer.
• Cold environments. TPE stays flexible down to -40 °C, which makes it a good match for outdoor equipment, refrigeration, and cold-climate installations where PVC embrittles.
• Good general chemical resistance. Better against many chemicals than PVC, though grade-dependent and generally not as good as XLPE for aggressive solvents.
• Clean processing and a wide colour range. Useful when you need colour-coded harnesses for ease of assembly, which is a bigger cost driver in production than people realise.
• Feel and handling. TPE tends to be softer and more pleasant to handle than PUR, which matters for consumer-facing products and hand-held devices.

Where TPE is not the answer:

• High-cycle drag chains. TPE will flex well, but for millions of cycles at tight bend radius, PUR is the better material. This is a case where "good enough" is genuinely good enough at 500,000 cycles and genuinely not at 10 million.
• Severe abrasion. TPE is good, not excellent. On a cable that drags over a rough floor continuously, PUR will last longer.
• High temperature. 105 °C is the usual ceiling, well below silicone or FEP.
• Oil and fuel immersion. TPE swells in many hydrocarbon environments. For continuous oil contact, XLPE or FEP are safer choices.

Silicone: temperature, flexibility, and abrasion

Silicone is the material people reach for when the temperature is high or flexibility has to survive extreme cold, and it is genuinely excellent at both. Its weaknesses are equally specific.

What silicone does well:

• Temperature range. -60 to +180 °C continuous, with short-term excursions to 200 °C and above. Nothing else on this list except the fluoropolymers comes close at the hot end.
• Flexibility across that range. Silicone stays flexible at -60 °C, where PVC is brittle and even PUR is stiffening. For equipment that operates cold and also gets hot, silicone is often the only material that covers both ends.
• UV, ozone, and weathering. Excellent. Silicone outdoor jackets last for decades.
• Halogen-free and low smoke. Good fire performance without the corrosive combustion products of PVC.
• Non-stick surface. Useful where product sticks to cables — food, adhesives, some coatings.

What silicone does badly:

• Abrasion. This is the big one. Silicone has poor abrasion resistance. A silicone-jacketed cable dragged over an edge or rubbed in a drag chain will wear through far faster than PUR. In high-flex machine applications, silicone is chosen for temperature and then fails mechanically — a very common and very avoidable outcome.
• Cut and tear. Also poor. Silicone is soft and cuts easily.
• Oil and fuel. Many silicone grades swell significantly in hydrocarbon oils and fuels. For an oily environment, this is disqualifying.
• Cost. Typically 3 to 5× PVC. Justified when the temperature demands it, expensive when it does not.
• Compression set. Silicone is excellent as a gasket material but as a jacket it can deform under sustained compression, which matters in tight cable clamps.

The rule we use: silicone for heat or cold where the cable is essentially static or lightly flexed. If the cable has to both run hot and move a lot in an abrasive environment, you need a composite construction — a silicone core with a protective over-braid or a glass-fibre sleeve — and that is a different product with a different price.

XLPE, FEP, and PTFE: chemistry and heat

These three exist because some applications cannot be solved with the commodity polymers. Each one is a specialist tool, and each one is expensive in a way that is only justified by a specific requirement.

XLPE (cross-linked polyethylene) is the workhorse of the three. Cross-linking changes the polymer structure so that it does not melt and flow at high temperature, and the result is a jacket with excellent chemical resistance, good dielectric properties, a 125 °C continuous rating, and a price only slightly above PVC. It is the standard choice for industrial power cable, solar cable, and any application where chemical resistance and moderate heat matter more than flex life. Its weaknesses are mechanical: abrasion is only fair and flex life is only fair, so it is a poor choice for anything that moves.

FEP is a fluoropolymer with near-universal chemical resistance, a 200 °C rating, excellent dielectric properties, and good abrasion for a fluoropolymer. It is the standard jacket for high-temperature, chemically aggressive, or high-reliability signal cable — thermocouple leads, laboratory instruments, medical devices, and semiconductor equipment. It is roughly 5 to 8× the cost of PVC, and its flex life is only fair, so it is normally used on static or lightly flexed runs.

PTFE is the most chemically inert common material and has the highest temperature rating at 260 °C. It is also the most expensive and the most difficult to process, with poor flex life and fair abrasion. In harness work it appears mainly as insulation on individual wires in extreme environments, or as a thin-wall jacket where nothing else survives. If you are specifying PTFE, you usually already know why.

A practical note on all three: they are stiff. A fluoropolymer-jacketed harness does not route like a PVC one, and a drawing that assumes a 6 mm bend radius will not be buildable. If you move from PVC to FEP on an existing design, expect to redesign the routing.

Chemical resistance against real cleaners

"Chemical resistant" is a marketing phrase. What you need is resistance to a specific chemical, at a specific concentration, at a specific temperature, for a specific contact time. This table is the version we use in customer conversations, and it is deliberately blunt about the cases that catch people out.

Two warnings about this table. First, "good" means good at ambient temperature and short contact. Raise the temperature or the concentration and the answer changes, often by two grades. Second, the compound matters more than the polymer family. There are PUR grades that survive 1,000 hours in peracetic acid and PUR grades that fail in a month. The table tells you which family to test; only an immersion test at your actual conditions tells you which grade to buy. We run those tests on request, and we keep the samples.

Temperature ratings that actually apply

Temperature ratings are the most over-trusted number on a datasheet. There are at least four different ratings for any given cable, they are not interchangeable, and using the wrong one is a common cause of premature failure.

The practical translation for the five main materials: PVC is an 80 °C material with a useful range that ends at about -15 °C for anything that gets handled. PUR is a 90 °C material that works happily to -40 °C. TPE is a 105 °C material, also good to -40 °C. Silicone is 180 °C and -60 °C. XLPE is 125 °C. FEP is 200 °C. Those are the numbers to design against — and then subtract 10 to 20 °C if the cable moves.

What each material costs

Price is where the argument usually ends, so it is worth being precise. The figures below are relative to PVC in the same construction, same gauge, same shield — so they isolate the material effect.

The way to read this: the material step is usually visible on the unit price but rarely dominant. Moving from PVC to PUR on a harness typically adds 10 to 25 percent to the total, not to the cable line — because connectors, labour, and testing are unaffected. Compare that with the cost of a field replacement: the harness, the service visit, the downtime, and the customer conversation. On anything that moves, the PUR premium pays for itself the first time the alternative fails inside the warranty.

The mistake to avoid is spending the premium where the stress does not exist. A PVC-to-silicone upgrade on a static indoor harness that never exceeds 50 °C costs 30 percent more and buys nothing. That money is better spent on testing, or on a better connector, or simply not spent.

Compliance claims and what they mean

Jacket materials attract more compliance language per square centimetre than any other part of a harness. Most of it is true and none of it means what buyers assume. Here is the translation.

• RoHS. Restricts ten substances, including lead, cadmium, and several phthalates. Almost all cable sold into Europe and North America complies. If a supplier cannot produce a RoHS declaration, that is a documentation problem rather than a material problem, and it tells you something about their paperwork in general.
• REACH / SVHC. Requires declaration of substances of very high concern above 0.1 % by weight. This is a moving target — the candidate list grows — so the declaration is only meaningful with a date on it.
• Halogen-free. Means no chlorine, bromine, fluorine, or iodine in the formulation, usually verified by test to IEC 60754 or an equivalent. Note that "low smoke zero halogen" (LSZH) and "halogen-free" are related but not identical claims, and that FEP and PTFE are themselves halogenated — so a halogen-free requirement rules out the fluoropolymers entirely.
• UL recognition. A UL style number (e.g. AWM styles) means the construction has been recognised against a specific standard, with specific temperature and voltage ratings. The style number is the useful part; the UL logo alone is not. Ask for the style number and check it against the construction you are buying.
• Flame retardancy. The common ratings — VW-1, FT1, FT4, IEC 60332 — describe performance in a specific test, not a general fire safety guarantee. FT4 is more demanding than FT1 for vertical tray flame spread. If your product standard requires a specific rating, say which one.
• Food contact. FDA 21 CFR 177 and EU 1935/2004 / 10/2011 declarations are material-level statements. A jacket can be made from compliant materials and still not be a compliant assembly, because the manufacturing process, lubricants, and labels also matter. We supply material declarations; we do not certify a machine.
• Low outgassing. Relevant in sealed enclosures, cleanrooms, optical equipment, and space. There is no single standard, so ask for the test method and the result — ASTM E595 is the usual reference for total mass loss and collected volatile condensable materials.

One habit worth building: ask for the material certificate for the actual batch, not the product family datasheet. A datasheet describes what the compound is supposed to be. A batch certificate tells you what was on the reel that went into your harness, and they are not always the same document — which is exactly how customers end up with a "halogen-free" cable that fails a halogen test.

Failure modes and field symptoms

When a jacket fails in the field, the symptom usually points at the material. This table is our diagnostic guide, and it is also a good way to reverse-engineer what went wrong with a harness you already have in service.

Note how many of those are not jacket problems at all. Corrosion is a sealing problem, a broken conductor is a stranding problem, localised hardening is a routing problem. Suppliers get asked to change the jacket in all three cases, and changing the jacket fixes none of them.

A selection decision tree

This is the sequence we run when a customer sends a drawing and we are not sure the specified jacket is right. It is deliberately ordered by how often each question actually changes the answer.

Step 1 — Does anything in the environment attack the material? Get the specific chemical list: cleaners, oils, fuels, solvents, with concentrations and temperatures. If there is an aggressive chemical at elevated temperature, this question decides everything else. Cross-reference the chemical table, then confirm with an immersion test on the actual grade.

Step 2 — Does the cable move? Static, occasional flex, or continuous flex in a drag chain or torsion application. If it is continuous flex above about a million cycles a year, PUR or a PUR-equivalent is the default, and everything else in this article is a compromise.

Step 3 — What is the temperature, cold end and hot end, and is it dry or wet? Below -25 °C rules out PVC. Above 105 °C rules out PVC, PUR, and TPE. Above 150 °C narrows the field to silicone and fluoropolymers. And "80 °C in water" is not the same requirement as "80 °C dry."

Step 4 — Is there a compliance requirement? Halogen-free rules out PVC and the fluoropolymers. Food contact rules out most formulations that are not specifically declared. UL style may constrain the construction regardless of material preference.

Step 5 — What is the abrasion and handling environment? Dragged over edges, stepped on, coiled repeatedly, installed through a tight conduit. This is where silicone loses and PUR wins, and it is the question most specifications skip.

Step 6 — What does the routing allow? Minimum bend radius, cable diameter, and how much space there is. Changing from PVC to a fluoropolymer changes the stiffness and can make the original routing unbuildable. Check before you commit.

Step 7 — Only now, look at the price. At this point the material is usually decided by steps 1 through 6, and the cost conversation becomes a conversation about whether the requirement is real. Which is a much better conversation than arguing about a datasheet.

One closing principle. The jacket is the cheapest part of a harness to get right and one of the most expensive to get wrong, because the failure appears in year two when the product is in the field and the fix is a service campaign. Spending an hour on steps 1 to 3 before you freeze the design is the highest-return hour in the whole program.

Why work with us

We are a custom wire harness and cable assembly factory in Xiamen. We buy cable in volume across all seven of these materials, which means we can tell you what a jacket change will actually do to your price rather than guessing from a datasheet.

What you get on a material decision:

• Free DFM review in 48 hours, including the jacket. If the drawing says PVC and the environment says washdown, we will tell you before the first unit is built. That review is the cheapest thing we do for a customer and the reason a fair amount of our work started with somebody else's field failure.
• Immersion testing at your real conditions. Send us the cleaner, the concentration, the temperature, and the contact time, and we will test candidate jacket and gasket materials against it and keep the samples and results. A datasheet says what the compound is supposed to do; a test says what it does in your plant.
• Build to print, from whatever you have. Complete drawing, partial schematic, Excel BOM, photo of a competitor's assembly, or a sketch. Reconstructing the document set with you is part of the job and we do it at no charge on a new program.
• 100 % electrical test and 100 % manual final inspection on every assembly, with records traceable to the batch of wire, terminals, and the operator. Plus pull-force verification on high-current and safety circuits, and dimensional checks where fit matters.
• Batch material certificates, not just family datasheets. If your customer asks which compound went into which shipment, we can answer with a document.
• 5-day ECO turnaround. A jacket change is exactly the kind of engineering change you will want to make after the first field feedback, and it should be fast.
• Low-volume realistic. MOQ 100 pcs for a new program, pilots of 10–50 pcs priced honestly. Material selection advice is worth the most before you have committed to a design, which is exactly when volumes are small.
• A supplier who will tell you to spend less. If your application does not need the material you specified, we will say so and quote you the cheaper one. Twice this year we have done that on jackets. It costs us a little on the order and it is why those customers are still with us.

We will not be the cheapest supplier you talk to. We will be the one who told you the jacket was wrong while there was still time to change it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What is the difference between PVC and PUR cable jacket?
PVC is cheaper, easier to process, and perfectly adequate for static, dry, indoor applications between about -10 and +70 °C. PUR is roughly 1.8 to 2.5 times the material cost and is dramatically better where the cable moves: 2 to 4× better abrasion resistance and far higher flex life. The practical difference shows up in service life, not on a datasheet. A PVC harness in a drag chain typically fails at 1 to 3 million cycles; a properly built PUR harness runs tens of millions. The other big difference is chemical — PVC loses plasticizer to alkalis and solvents and swells; PUR resists oils well but hydrolyses in continuous hot water.

Q2: Is PUR good for washdown applications?
For splash and spray, yes — PUR is one of the better choices. For continuous hot-water immersion or steam above about 70 °C, no: PUR hydrolyses and eventually goes soft and gummy. This catches a lot of people because PUR is marketed as the washdown material. If your machine gets a 60 °C alkaline foam washdown twice a shift, that is splash and spray and PUR works, provided you choose a grade that resists the specific cleaner. If it sits in hot water, you need a different answer, usually XLPE or a fluoropolymer.

Q3: When should I use silicone instead of PUR?
Silicone when the requirement is temperature or extreme cold — above 105 °C, or below -40 °C, or both — or when the cable is mostly static and needs to stay flexible and UV-stable for decades. PUR when the requirement is mechanical: abrasion, cut, continuous flex, dragging on a floor. The failure mode to avoid is picking silicone for a hot application that also moves in an abrasive environment. Silicone has poor abrasion resistance and will wear through where PUR would not. If you need both, you need a composite construction — silicone core with a protective braid or sleeve — and that is a different product.

Q4: How do I know which jacket will survive my cleaning chemicals?
Two steps. First, get the actual product list from your sanitation team: brand names, active ingredients, concentrations, temperatures, and contact times. Not the category — the actual products. Second, immersion-test the candidate materials at those conditions before committing a program. A generic "chemical resistant" claim is not a specification, and there are PUR grades that survive 1,000 hours in peracetic acid and PUR grades that fail in a month. We run those tests and keep the samples and results. If a supplier cannot tell you what test they would run, they are guessing.

Q5: What does halogen-free mean, and when do I actually need it?
It means the formulation contains no chlorine, bromine, fluorine, or iodine, usually verified to IEC 60754 or an equivalent test. You need it when a product standard, a customer requirement, or a fire-safety specification demands it — typically in rail, marine, tunnels, data centres, and public buildings, where the corrosive and toxic combustion products of halogenated cable are the concern. Note two things: PVC fails it because of the chlorine, and FEP and PTFE also fail it because they are fluorinated. So a halogen-free requirement narrows the field to TPE, XLPE, and halogen-free PUR, and it eliminates the best high-temperature materials.

Q6: Why does my cable jacket go brittle after a few years?
Almost always plasticizer loss in a PVC jacket, driven by heat, time, or chemical exposure. PVC is rigid polymer plus plasticizer, and the plasticizer migrates out. The rate depends on temperature and on what the jacket is in contact with — a cable resting against a hot surface, or one that sees solvent wipe-downs, will embrittle years earlier than the datasheet predicts. The other possibility is cold embrittlement if the cable has been stored or installed below its cold bend temperature. If the failure is cracking at bends on a cable that used to be flexible, it is plasticizer loss and the answer is a different material, not a different supplier.

Q7: Can you help me choose a jacket for an application I am still designing?
Yes, and that is the best time to ask. Send the application description: what the product is, where it lives, what it touches, the temperature range including installation and storage, whether it moves and how often, the cleaning or fluid exposure, and any compliance requirement. We will come back with two or three candidate materials and the trade-offs, usually within a couple of days, and we will tell you which one we would use if it were our product. At the design stage the answer is often a material you had not considered, and it costs nothing to ask — which is not true after the tooling is made.

Ask Us About Your Jacket Before You Freeze the Drawing

Send us the drawing, or the application description if you do not have one yet: what the product is, the environment it lives in, the cleaning or fluid exposure, the temperature range, whether the cable moves, and any compliance requirement. We will come back with a jacket recommendation, the trade-offs, and a DFM review — normally within 48 hours.

If you have a harness in the field that is failing and you are not sure why, send us a failed unit and photos of the failure. Nine times out of ten the symptom points at one of the causes in the failure table above, and about a third of the time it is not the jacket at all.

Email: [wireharness@xmkehan.com]
Typical response time: 24 hours, Monday to Friday

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