I spent the late hours of last night reading the entire corporate page of ZodiacAerospace (it was an e-copy of their annual report). Zodiac apparently made the Zodiac boats that Cousteau was always speaking of. These had flotation sides that were tubes of cloth-covered rubber material. Fast forward and Zodiac Aerospace is making large numbers of aircraft seats, with knowledge of how to affix cloth to a rubberized backing with rubber cement a key factor here, receiving much attention.
At some point, ZA appears to have acquired a company they made into a division called ECE (could not discove its antecedent name). ECE made one major product (taking the single product mentioned in the annual report), namely "contactors". ECE, with the backing of ZA, widened its line to aircraft electrical distribution systems, including panelboards, and some high intensity LED cabin llighting.
ECE now seems to be principally manufacturing in Tunisia (certainly their contactors). Cabin seats are manufactured in several countries (not France), of which Tunisia is one of ZA's larger producton locations.
So ZA began as a maker of rubber boats, and Boeing began as a maker of aircraft. I recall that certain Rolls-Royce turbines of great output had turbine shaft bearings make by a German supplier who had been a maker of motorcycles.
In the matter of the matter of the contactor part number, I think the whole part number would have to be something like "Contactor, aircraft, 104CZ02Y01". The number form has tripped a dim memory-- it seems to derive from the [US] Federal Specification system which saw such developement in WWII. So, 104C identifies the basic contactor wanted, and Y01 is an add-on set of repeating contacts (the Y01 is what I remember ...IIRC of course).
I forget what Z02 was, but it's some sort of add-on device that could also be ordered preinstalled. The repeating contacts would confirm to the supervisory system board that the contactor had actually moved as commanded. I forget what Z02 was, but I want to say Z was for locks. On one job where there were a lot of these puppies (GE had beautiful and massive slick paper catalogs of all this good stuff), I recall on a double-end substation, we had a load bus divided in the center (by some distance), so we had three large breakers (1200 amps) locked by special keys-- only two nonreproducible keys. So the power sources could not be interconnected; also the phase cable across the center separation were additionally protected by cable limiters (a type of fuse) at one end.
This all sounds OT, but it is exactly the configuration of the two battery souces in the 787. Or should be-- that is why I am puzzled that someone said the forward battery could assist the APU battery in starting the APU. Well, of course its DC and you have that diode isolation (that never shorts through, of course). Not at the same time, I hope.
You could also get field kits for more elaborate add-on functions, but these were not available factory-assembled. Possibly mechanical latches or blocking devices were in this category. One thing I recall was an electric drive to reset the bigger breakers, otherwise a crank was used.
So who knows what this contactor situation really was?
OE
PS-- What is the difference between the battery bus and the hot battery bus?
