The 7th AMI international conference on cables was the most successful event ever. The venue at the Maritim Hotel in Cologne was packed out. Kerry Satterthwaite (AMI) gave an excellent overview of the European cable industry.

Around 2% of the plastics processors in Europe are cable producers and polymer consumption varies in different geographic regions, despite EU efforts to harmonize the industry.

A primary focus of the conference was the new European construction products Directive - wire and cable are now considered as building materials.

This new legislation classifies cables by their fire safety performance and the testing protocols are still being worked out as described by Terry Journeaux of Prysmian Cables and Systems.

The problem is to develop repeatable and reproducible standards so that accredited laboratories all give the same fire classification for the same cables.

There is a lot of cable in modern buildings and as electrical failure is a common cause of ignition, cable fire performance can be critical.

David Kiddoo of AlphaGary gave a spectacular presentation including live video clips of cable fire testing to different safety standards, from the Steiner Tunnel to the riser cable test.

He commented on combustion toxicity, a topic also addressed by Dr Rick Whiteley.

Dow Corning has also been carrying out fire testing - on a variety of new compounds under development.

Vivien Kilian (Albermarle) examined trends in automotive wire and cable.

Materials differ in different global regions and include PVC, or XLPE and PP with flame retardants.

The paper examined potential future trends in flame retardants.

Elastogran has TPU materials for cable applications - around 50% of use is in automotive applications where the company has worked on flat cable technology for automated installation.

PolyOne has examined the hot oil resistance of compounds for applications such as railways, offshore, marine, military and machinery.

The key application discussed by Borealis this year was data cable, a sector driven by the rapid growth in IT and communications systems.

The trend is to install as advanced a cable as possible to anticipate demand.

There are issues with 'crosstalk' between cables and this requires the development of new test protocols and standards.

James Robinson described foamed PP for this application.

New materials for cables were introduced at the conference including metallocene based elastomers (Exxon Mobil), elastomer modified polyphenylene sulphide for high temperature wire coating (Chevron Phillips Chemicals), halogen-free flame retardant compounds (AlphaGary, Arkema and Budenheim), electron beam cured elastomers (Lanxess), coupling agents for halogen-free polyolefins (DuPont de Nemours) and silanes for faster crosslinking of PE (Degussa).

Dow Wire and Cable is working on new semiconductive compounds to speed up production.

Herbert Baur talked about the design of bedding compounds, which lie between the insulating compound and the cable sheath.

Compatibility is important and factors such as plasticizer migration have been studied as it can have a major effect on long-term performance.

Dr Gunter Beyer of Kabelwerk Eupen has been working on nanocomposite flame retardants for the cable industry.

In his experience, layered double hydroxides have a major synergistic effect with halogen and non-halogen flame retardants.

They appear to act by altering the degradation pathway and imparting barrier properties.

Cables 2008 is moving to a larger capacity conference hall and has been scheduled for 3-5 March 2008 in the Maritim Hotel, Cologne, Germany.