Book by Vladimir I. Berezhinsky

Safety and effectiveness of mine winding installations greatly depends on used ropes. Thus special attention should be paid to the their selection. This monograph introduces vast amount of information on ropes for mine winding installations and requirements for providing their safe operation.

Author explains features of various steel rope constructions, explains trade-offs of their usage while taking into account purpose and operational conditions, provides rope computation algorithms. Substantiates directions for further research directed towards minimizing the risk of accidents while fully using rope potential.

During winding installations working cycle ropes are exposed to variable force loads (stretching, contact, bending) and external aggressive environment. This causes emerging wire wear and reduced rope durability in general. This book examines pros and cons of different rope surveillance methods, allowing to reveal damages for further decision on replacement of worn out rope. Specific attention is paid to non destructive control over distributed (loss of metallic area) and local (wire breaks) defects.

For whom is this book written

The Author

Mining engineer-mechanic Vladimir I. Berezhinsky has graduated from Donetsk National Technical University in 1961 and worked as constructor engineer in multi rope winders department of special design bureau of machine-building factory. Since 1964 started postgraduate study in ropes field under supervision of Prof. V.D.Belyi. In 1967 defended the dissertation of Candidate of Sciences in the mining institute, Dnepropetrovsk. For 40 years, since 1973 to 2013 worked alternately as head of sector, laboratory, division in the division of mine transport and lifting in Makeyevka State Research Institute for Safety in the mining industry (MakNII), where lead all research works related to increasing endurance and safe use of ropes for mine winding installations. In 1989 defended the dissertation of Doctor of Sciences in State Mining University of Moscow

V. Berezhinsky provided methodological management of all rope-testing stations of the USSR (since 1991 - of Ukraine). Works on ensuring mine rope use safety were conducted throughout the territory of the USSR from western Ukraine to Russian Far East, Norilsk in northern Russia to Uzbekistan and the Caucasus in the south. Provided the services for non-mining facilities as well, for example, worked with heavy-duty cranes at the military naval base in Balaklava (Sevastopol), aerial cableways on Caucasus and Crimea, pier in Klaipeda (Lithuania) on ferry Klaipeda-Rostock. In the nineties consulted several international companies.

The Book

Large amount of work on non-destructive testing (NDT) of steel wire ropes in mines and laboratory held testing of worn rope portions on horizontal tensile testing machines allowed to justify stochastic approach to the breaking strength evaluation of worn ropes on loss of metallic area (LMA). While using rope testers IISK for testing, breaking strength does not depend on local damages in cases when concentration of visually detected wire breaks doesn’t exceed the rejection norm for the number of wire breaks on the lay length of the rope.

Realization of the stochastic approach allowed to bypass the obstacle well-known to all specialists while testing loss of metallic area (LMA) by using non-destructive testing (NDT), - when at the same LMA values on different portions of the rope might exist significant difference in breaking forces. Was proposed the method of substantiation of rope discard criteria by LMA according to the results of NDT. These criteria were successfully used for several decades in numerous mines of the Soviet Union and are still used in the countries that became independent after the USSR collapse.

Theoretical foundations for discarding ropes with wire breaks were created based on the analysing results of fatigue testing of rope samples on hydraulic fatigue-testing machines. The wire breaks accumulation process could be described with mathematical apparatus for random point processes.

Whole process from the appearance of the first wire break until the destruction of the first strand consists of three stages:

• First stage – safe and slow accumulation of wire breaks since occurrence of the first break.
• Third stage – the accelerated avalanche accumulation of the wire breaks.
• Second stage - transition stage. Emergence and accumulation of broken wires relating to the second stage in the total aggregate of all accumulated wire breaks leads to a deviation from the mathematical model established for the first stage. That is the ground for well timed replacement of the damaged rope.

The real obstacle ourdays is low reliability of the detection of wire breaks by an absolute majority of the existing rope testers. Technical requirements to the rope testers are defined based on the results of bench examinations of several rope tester constructions of different manufacturers and different ropes with artificial damages. Bench tests were conducted at different tensile stresses, speeds of movement of the rope tester sensor head, at different LMA values (in percentages), etc.

Important Outcomes

New and important results in monograph are:

• Algorithm for calculating with defined reliability level the rejection criteria of worn ropes that are in operation, based on stochastic assessment of their breaking strength by results of measuring LMA (loss of metallic area).
• New algorithm for calculating dynamic load on the plummet of the weighty rope in case of instantaneous cargo attachment to an arbitrary point along the plummet, by transferring impact of such attachment from the boundary conditions for hyperbolic differential equation with partial derivatives in the equation itself.
• Fundamentals of an algorithm describing the process of wire breaks fatigue accumulation during non-destructive testing (NDT) for making decision on rope replacement.
• Generalized Euler equation for the case of interaction between friction pulley and wire rope at lowered values of relation between their diameters, taking into account dependence of the bending stiffness of the wire rope from the tensile stresses.
• Experimental dependence of adhesive force between the wire rope cord and rubber of the multi-element ribbon-type flat counterbalancing ropes from service life of these ropes.

Translation Partnership / Contact

"Ropes for mine winding installations" is currently available only in Russian (“Канаты шахтных подъемных установок”, Moscow, University Book, 2015, ISBN 978-5-98699-163-4).

If you or your institution might be interested to have it translated into your language please let us know!

• email: [email protected]
• skype: anton.berezhinsky