2007-11-15

Storm-Safe, designed in SolidWorks, reduces damage, power outage time, and electrocution risk during storms

‘Breakaway link’ is key feature in new, safer utility connector

The ice-glazed branches of your front-yard oak tree shimmer in the December sunlight. It’s a beautiful pre-holiday scene… until a limb crashes down onto a power line, ripping clapboards from your house, stranding your family without electricity, and posing a deadly electrocution risk – sometimes for days.

This fearsome scenario plagued hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners last year and prompted The Homac Companies, a utility connector manufacturer in Florida, to design an entirely new, safer way for homes to connect to power lines. Storm-Safe®, designed entirely in SolidWorks® 3D CAD software, is a simple “breakaway link” fixed to a utility pole that automatically disconnects cables from poles under abnormal stresses. Because the cables disconnect on the pole side, not at the home, the fallen wire carries no current. When the storm subsides, a new link is quickly installed, allowing utility workers to plug in the cables, energize the home, and be on their way.

“Storm-Safe minimizes damage to both the home and utility, containing damage to a single breakaway link, ensuring fallen wires aren’t energized, and compressing the power recovery process to mere minutes,” said Jim Zahnen, senior product development engineer for Homac. “This is an industry first and something that is gaining worldwide interest from our international utilities customers. It’s good business and it’s good for customers. SolidWorks software helped us visualize the design, refine it with internal and customer feedback, and quickly develop the necessary engineering drawings for each configuration, a process that couldn’t happen with our old 2D software. SolidWorks is helping us work more productively, especially in developing configurations of new products, and the transition from 2D has been surprisingly intuitive.”

Storm-Safe comes in configurations to serve one, two, or three homes and is rated for 200 amp service.

“As Homac is demonstrating with Storm-Safe, the right CAD tool can make a significant difference in the nature of product a company can produce,” said Rainer Gawlick, SolidWorks vice president of worldwide marketing . “This isn’t an incremental improvement; this is what we like to call an ‘absurdly ideal’ breakthrough with a big potential impact.”

Information about the company: CadON Oy