Flexible cables, or ‘continuous-flex’ cables, are cables specially designed to cope with the tight bending radii and physical stress associated with moving applications, such as inside cable carriers.

Due to increasing demands within the field of automation technology in the 1980s, such as increasing loads, moving cables guided inside cable carriers often failed, although the cable carriers themselves did not. In extreme cases, failures caused by “corkscrews” and core ruptures brought entire production lines to a standstill, at high cost. As a result, specialized, highly flexible cables were developed with unique characteristics to differentiate them from standard designs. These are sometimes called �chain-suitable,� �high-flex,� or �continuous flex� cables.