New ECT Accordionâ„¢ Technology Provides Reliable Contact in Harsh Environments

Patented interconnect solution offers unprecedented cost and reliability advantages for high insertion count applications

Everett Charles Technologies (ECT) has been supplying spring probes for over 50 years. ECT leverages this industry leading experience for unique, customer focused solutions to the most challenging connector requirements. Accordion™ is a patented contact technology from ECT that targets high reliability applications. It’s well suited for demanding environments found in the military, aerospace and medical markets. Recently the ECT Accordion contact has been selected as interconnect platform solution for a critical signal and power transmission application by a tier one military contractor.

Accordion spring contacts incorporate a compliant, one-piece spring in an open architecture format to accommodate a wide range of physical circuit topologies. The Accordion is ideal for harsh environments. Utilizing a single contact eliminates the threat of liquid and debris build up between parts while also being tolerant of vibration and shock. Accordion offers several surface contact advantages over traditional compliant contacts. One of which is placing multiple contacts per position to allow for single target redundancy.

It can also be designed to provide a controlled scrub which removes oxides and debris from the contact position and its mate. The Accordion scrubbing action ensures surface contact, while the single beam prevents the momentary resistance spikes found in connection systems requiring a wide range of actuation.

This versatile contact can be tailored to specific x-y-z envelops and compression force targets.

Tony DeRosa, Product Manager, explains: “ECT was given the challenge to create an interconnect for harsh environments, where the electrical properties would remain unaffected. Competition was limited to conventional spring probe options and required the development of a costly and unproven sealed design. We at ECT were able to use our patented Accordion technology to produce a single beam contact that is unaffected by liquid, and has the ability to wipe away surface contaminants. The contact form factor was also designed to enable a redundant contact in each position. All of this was accomplished at a cost below that of a custom pogo.”

Learn more about the ECT Accordion: https://ectcpg.azurewebsites.net/accordion