Design of a Cable Sealing Solution

Sammanfattning

To seal a cable going into the chassis of a camera, a cable gasket is placed between the chassis and the gasket. This type of gasket is called a grommet. For this project, these grommets needed to be able to withstand a modular plug being pulled through and at the same time be as small as possible to fit into a small space. The purpose of this master thesis was to investigate how to make a grommet smaller, than existing solutions, while still being easy to install with an attached modular plug. The grommet is to be used in an outdoor environment and therefore had to fulfill the sealing requirement of IP67. The Ulrich and Eppinger methodology was used as a foundation for the development process and an iterative approach was integrated. Background information was gathered from interviews and similar solutions were benchmarked to get more insight into grommets. Together with needs and requirements, concepts were generated, prototyped, tested and then selected. A material evaluation was also conducted. This resulted in four concepts being prototyped in silicone rubber. The project ended up with two grommets that both used a slit. The result showed that that a grommet with a slit was the most promising concept since this could be made smaller and was the easiest to install. Testing of the prototypes also showed that some concepts with specific hardnesses and certain hole dimensions in the chassis fulfilled the IP67 requirements. This means that the resulting grommet could be implemented in future cameras that would need a sealing solution that is small and easy to install with an attached modular plug.