Even the best thought out plug-and-socket connector design can be doomed to fail if an unsuitable contact technology is employed. Hypertac will be using its hyperboloid contact principle for its qualitatively high-grade products.
This involves the use of a socket contact containing a hyperbolically shaped wire cage. If you stretch wires around two metal rings facing one another and twist these a few degrees against each other, the wires will be stretched more and more diagonally. At the centre point of contact you will find a narrowing of the diameter which decreases hyperbolically towards the metal ring.
If you now insert the connector pin it will displace the wires. The contact cage now wraps around the connector pin as it were and for each wire a line contact with an infinite number of contact points is created. Across the entire circumference of the connector pin can be seen, depending on the contact diameter, a large number of wires. This all around contact ensures optimum contact reliability even under the most severe vibration conditions. Resonance frequencies, that can cause individual wires to loose contact, cannot arise because the connector pin is securely wrapped within the wires. A further advantage: the extremely small contact normal forces lead to smallest possible plugging and unplugging forces and prevent "fretting corrosion" which can occur in the presence of vibrations.
WHAT CONTACT QUALITY DO INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS REQUIRE?
You may well think that this type of complexity is unnecessary for industrial applications. Ever more demanding customer requirements however prove otherwise. The number of applications that are subject to extremely severe vibrations are increasing and even the long established plug-and-socket connectors on the market are failing as a result of electrical or mechanical problems.
Signal interruptions of several nanoseconds, in the rotary element of a positioning drive for example, can lead each time to the total failure of an entire system. With today's complex industrial equipment, even the loss of a few bits in a measurement or control system can lead to enormous costs or loss of quality in the parts being produced. Therefore: contact reliability is becoming more important than ever as serial data streams increase in speed.
MORE ECONOMICAL, BETTER PROCESABILITY FOR THE SAME PERFORMANCE
CIP, the Continuous Improvement Process, is not just a catchphrase but a MUST for every company that has to take up the new challenges of the market everyday. The technical masterpiece - the twisted Hypertac single contact - has been implemented effectively using the stamped/rolled HCS. The HCS component series (1mm and 2mm) can be processed from the roll on standard crimping machines.
The stamped wire cage has the same design characteristics for all the variants: the individual contact ridges have a round shape on the contacting side and therefore are of "wire quality" to the inserted connector pin. It is no exaggeration to speak of wire quality as each wire ridge has a thickness of just 0.2mm! A diffusion barrier made of 1.27 nickel and a selective gold coating of 0.8 applied to the contact area round-off the general requirements. All HCS contacts are constructed from two parts. The contact body is made of a copper alloy whereby the stamped wire cage is protected by a high-grade steel outer spring. This high-grade steel sleeve serves as an additional heat sink during operation but also has the task of securing the contact within the contact chamber of the insulating body. It is also worth mentioning that the HCS contact can be exchanged one for one with the standard wire contact. A customer who is currently incorporating Hypertac machined sockets for circular industrial connectors can therefore switch over to this product immediately.
ADVANTAGES FOR THE CUSTOMER ARE OBVIOUS:
Besides a far lower price per contact there are tremendous processing advantages. The contacts are supplied on rolls and can be processed on standard stripper/crimping machines. Hand crimping tools for field applications are also available.
For a conducting crimp, we use the so-called B crimp for the HCS contact. For an insulating crimp however, we chose a wrapping crimp which offers excellent roundness and makes inserting the contacts in the contact chamber considerably easier.
The soft design of the contact with its distinctive plug face and lack of primary stop spring offers further advantages. Jamming of the contact when it is inserted in the contact chamber is precluded because neither the coding nose nor the primary stop spring require pre-orientation.
Locking of the contact in the insulating body occurs by means of locking lances in the insulating body itself. That's why we were able to do away with the usual primary stop spring on the contact which again leads to a processing advantage. The typical phenomenon of contacts hooking into one another during cabling doesn't occur.
ABOUT HYPERTAC
Hypertac is a leading supplier of high reliability, high performance interconnect solutions and electrical/electronic connectors. The company has particular expertise in the rapid development of innovative interconnect solutions for high reliability applications in military, aerospace, industrial, mass transit, test & measurement and medical electronics markets.
The Hypertac range includes printed circuit board connectors, modular, rectangular, filtered ARINC and circular connectors. Hypertac connectors achieve outstanding performance through the use of patented Hyperboloid contacts.
Hypertac hyperboloid contact is an advanced design that satisfies the most demanding performance requirements. The shape of the contact sleeve is formed by wires strung at an angle to the socket axis. When the pin is inserted into the sleeve, the wires stretch around it, providing a number of linear contact paths. This ensures high reliability, a high number of mating cycles, shock and vibration immunity, low contact resistance and low insertion and extraction force.