Electrical Design Software | Elecdes Design Suite by Scada Systems Ltd

Weight Filling Factor for Raceway, Cables and Wires

Weight Factor Description

The weight factor represents your local regulations regarding cable weight. The weight factor is used to optimise raceway filling.

  • Each cable or wire has a weight representing the amount by which it will fill raceway.

  • Each raceway segment has a weight factor representing the weight of wires or cables that it can carry.

The attribute or field should contain a number e.g. "205 kg/km", "0.1 kg/m", "137 lbs/1000ft", "109.5 lbs", "203 lb/ft" with units.

WEIGHT and WEIGHTFCTR Attribute and Field or Column

The weight factor of a raceway segment, e.g. cable tray, is specified in the WEIGHTFCTR column of a raceway catalog. A weight factor value in a WEIGHTFCTR field or column without units is assumed to be specified in kg/m for metric users or lb/ft for imperial users.

The weight of a cable or wire is specified in the WEIGHT field / column in the wire report or cable report. These values can be obtained from the same field or column in the appropriate catalog file. A cable weight value in a WEIGHT field or column without units is assumed to be specified in kg/km for metric useres or lb/1000ft for imperial users.

The WEIGHT values in the sample cable and wire catalogs generally specify only the weight (e.g. "109.5 lbs") without the distance. Where the distance is not specified the default distance is assumed: per 1km or per 1000ft of cable (i.e. "109.5 lbs" really means "109.5 lbs/1000ft").

Take note that there is a 1000x difference between the default WEIGHTFCTR value specified for raceway and the WEIGHT specified for cables and wires because of the difference in distance.

Weight Factor use in Route Optimisation

Weight filling factors will be checked as conductors are allocated to routes. Alternate routes must be used if the sum of the weight of all conductors presently placed in any part of a route (segment) exceeds the weight factor of that route segment.

The largest conductors (by cable filling factor) will be placed in a route first. The largest and therefore generally the heaviest conductors will take the optimum routes where available.

Raceway Fill Reporting

The raceway fill percentage is calculated as follows:

 Sum of the weight for all wires or cables in a raceway segment / The segment's weight factor.

This value is placed in the FILL_WT column of the raceway cross section report.

WEIGHTFCTR 0.0

A WEIGHTFCTR of 0.0 allows infinite fill if found on a raceway segment.

A cable or wire will be treated as infinitely small if its WEIGHT is set to 0.0.

See also

Panel ducting

Raceway

How to tune your model for wire and cable routing

Routing functions description

Route optimisation errors and warnings

Power numbers for raceway

Cable filling factor for raceway