Impact of fiber versus steel ropes on the lifetime of crane winches

Abstract

Offshore crane winches are equipment installed on sea vessels and designed for accurate lifting and lowering of payloads at subsea levels in all conditions. In recent times, attempts have been made to replace conventional heavy steel ropes used in crane winches with high-strength synthetic fibre ropes for their various advantages, particularly for having comparable strength with steel at a much lower weight. Such an advantage makes it possible, in principle, to downsize a crane winch for the same lifting capacity leading to considerable savings or alternatively, to increase the service life of an existing crane winch and make the most out of its lifting capacity. However, it is still not known to what extent can replacing steel ropes in crane winches with fibre ropes increase their service life and in this paper, an attempt is made to answer this question.

Keywords

• lifetime
• reliability
• offshore
• winch
• fibre
• ropes