Measuring Durability of Pvc-Based Charging Cable using Automated Mechanical Manipulation

Charging cables became essential to our lives due to an exponential increase in the number of portable electronics in recent decades. One of the most common charging cable types is PVC-based charging cables due to their flexibility and tendency to prevent cables from degrading. In fact, the durability of charging cables is crucial when making better consumer choices; however, it is often challenging to obtain accurate information regarding charging cable durability when purchasing such cables, and there is no established way of objectively measuring the durability. This paper suggests one way of measuring the durability of charging cable via mechanical manipulations. In this paper, three different types of mechanical manipulations—bending, twisting, and combination of both—were performed on the most common types of PVC-based charging cables—USB type C and lightning cable—up to failures to accurately obtain the durabilities of cables. For each cable type, original equipment manufacturer(OEM) cable and generic cable were used for comparison. The study discovered that OEM charging cable performed approximately 400% better compared to the generic ones for both USB type C and lightning cable. Despite they both used the same PVC material, this performance discrepancy is most likely due to different percent composition of PVC material in the cable. Also, the PVC material was further