Importance of rope NDT for safe lifting of loading cranes

Russian State Rules for the crane safe exploitation require instrumental testing of ropes by magnetic flaw detectors while periodical crane inspection. Unfortunately, not all inspection centers use the instrumental magnetic testing, contenting themselves only by visual inspection, which is subjective and does not provide inner faults detection. That is why the percentage of rope break is rather high in general statistics of crane damages and accidents. Analysis of two accidents in Moscow region with cranes in 2001 shows that both of them could be avoided if inspectors had used a magnetic flaw detector. Statistics of more than 50 crane rope inspections suggests that about 25% of crane ropes in use should be discarded.

 Author(s):  Sukhorukov, V.V., Kotelnikov, V.S., Zhukov, V.G. & Khudoshin, A.A.