Automated magnetic rope condition monitoring: concept and practical experience

Continuous rope monitoring is a new emerging application of rope NDT. It allows the enhancement of safety at critical rope installations, where potentially dangerous machines, such as drilling rigs, cranes at steel mills, man hoisting at mines and cranes in offshore applications are employed. The design and implementation of rope monitoring systems has to solve several problems, which are not actually common for rope testing instruments. Firstly, such monitoring systems should be rugged in design and should be able to work in severe working environments (high and low temperatures, high humidity, dust, vibration and in explosive environments) and at the same time require minimum servicing. Secondly, the instruments should be automated and give a clear and unambiguous indication of rope condition, so that the output can be effectively used by general machine operating personnel. To meet these contradictory requirements the monitoring system should be optimized for special rope applications. Results of a rope monitoring system Intros-Auto has applied for drilling rigs will be presented in this paper.

Author(s): D. Slesarev, S. Sukhorukov and I. Shpakov