Preliminary investigations of the understanding of the corrosion mechanisms in steel wire ropes

Ropes are extensively used for public transportation and a significant number of rope failures in cableways is being observed related to the corrosion phenomenon. Few studies have reported the corrosion and damage mechanism for aerial ropeway applications. In this work, we performed a post mortem analysis of two ten-years old tension ropes and report the influence of various parameters like temperature, O2 concentration on full locked coil rope and the role of lubricant on the corrosion kinetics, even if no interaction with stress loading nor fatigue was considered. Galvanic coupling due to both the environment impact and the contact between two different metals was also investigated. In a second part, we performed preliminary investigations of the behavior of stranded ropes that suffer from severe degradation in use, either in the outer or in the internal layers. A campaign of tests was performed to this purpose to simulate the conditions that are likely to cause the degradation of the rope in order to minimize the risks of corrosion associated to mechanical stress.