Industrial & Mining Cable Types: Designation, Standard & Application Index

One. SH is a single token meaning “connecting cable for heavy mechanical load”, and SSH means “special mechanical load”. NSHÖU reads N + SH + ö + u, not N + S + H + ö + u. This is a common misreading, and reading the S and the H separately produces a different description of the cable.

Ö (printed lowercase ö in the VDE legends) stands for ölbeständig , an oil-resistant sheath compound. In the same position, u means flame-resistant and w means heat- and weather-resistant. OEU is simply the ASCII transliteration of ÖU, so NSHOEU and NSHÖU are the same cable.

J means the cable is supplied with a green/yellow protective earth core; O means it is supplied without one. Everything else in the construction is normally identical. Choose J where the cable feeds equipment that needs a protective conductor, and O where earthing is provided separately or the circuit is isolated.

It is the IEC U0/U notation. U0 (0.6 kV) is the rated voltage between one conductor and earth or screen; U (1 kV) is the rated voltage between two phase conductors. A cable marked 3.6/6 kV is therefore a 6 kV system cable, not a 3.6 kV one.

Not formally. 600 V is a North American single-figure rating assigned under UL and CSA rules; 0.6/1 kV is the IEC U0/U rating. The two are used in comparable low-voltage distribution circuits, but they are type-tested to different standards and the approvals are not interchangeable. If a specification calls out one system, supply to that system.

No, and they are easy to confuse because both use bare numbers. Types 209, 210, 240, 241, 260 and 275 are Australian and New Zealand types under AS/NZS 1802; Types 409, 412, 440, 441 and 450 sit under AS/NZS 2802. Types 41 and 61A are South African, under SANS 1520 Part 1, and Types 63, 66, 611, 622 and 633 under SANS 1520 Part 2. A Type 41 and a Type 412 have nothing to do with each other.

Yes , that is what the “Equivalent build to order” entries in the index are. Where a construction is known in the market under a supplier’s own product name rather than a published standard, we build to the same electrical and mechanical specification instead of to that name. Send the datasheet or the drawing you are working from and we will confirm, item by item, which properties we match: conductor class and cross-section, insulation and sheath compound, screen and armour arrangement, temperature range, minimum bending radius and rated voltage. Construction values not listed here can vary with the build; request a quotation to confirm them.

It marks a construction that no published product standard covers , towed and underwater cables, hybrid fibre-and-power builds, umbilicals and similar. These are engineered against the project’s own requirement rather than a type standard, so the specification comes from your drawing and the applicable test standards, not from a type number. They are still tested to the usual IEC routine and type tests.

Sometimes, but the codes rarely map one to one. Before substituting, compare five things: insulation and sheath compound, temperature range, screening or armour arrangement, minimum bending radius, and the approvals the site actually requires. A construction that matches on paper can still fail on bending radius or on an approval the inspector asks for.

Reeling duty needs a cable that can take repeated tension , usually a supporting element (T), a central strength member or an anti-torsion lay, plus a sheath that survives drum pressure. Festoon and trolley duty puts far less tension on the cable but demands low elongation and a jacket that tolerates repeated flexing over a small radius. Flat constructions are common on festoon systems and rare on drums.

Core count and cross-section, the length per drum and total quantity, the movement type and travel, the ambient and conductor temperature, and any approval the project must satisfy. Those five items turn a designation into a price.