Abstract:

Steel wire ropes consist of several steel wires twisted together to make complex structure with huge mechanical properties combining axial strength and stiffness with bending flexibility. The use of these ropes has known tremendous growth and has had significant effect on several industrial applications. Particularly, non-rotating wire ropes, which prevent the rotation of the suspended load under important hoisting heights. Industrial experience shows that the sudden breaking of a large part of steel wire ropes in service is usually due to the cumulative damage of their components, which could lead to serious accidents. Therefore, wire ropes must be monitored during their operation so as to be able of changing them timely. Thus, this work aims to interpret the non-rotating rope’s residual strength in the quantitative sense, using an analytical model which enables us to track and to estimate the rope’s reliability in terms of its strands’ cumulative damage. A numerical application is given to show the performance of the model.