Failure Analysis and Safety Protection of a Certain Type of Wire Ropes under High-Speed Impact Loads

As the key bearing components in engineering projects, wire ropes often suffer from high-speed impact loads in service. In the majority of applications, wire ropes are subjected to the loads with the following characteristics: alternating impact loads, short-time overload, and small movements among adjacent spiral strands. Typical failure modes of wire ropes include fracture, wear, corrosion, geometric failure and thermal failure. In this work, the corresponding failure mechanisms were analyzed. For a certain type of wire ropes, the fracture morphology, surface quality, microstructure and internal defects of steel wires were analyzed, and failure causes were discussed. Accordingly, the precautions in relation to the safe use of wire ropes were proposed