Fatigue monitoring of climbing ropes

Abstract

Safety improvements in mountaineering gear have enabled the increasing popularity of rock climbing as a sport. Both amateurs and experts want to know the condition of their equipment with a high degree of reliability. For climbing ropes, diagnostics are only carried out qualitatively by visual inspection. The assessment is left to the personal judgment of the user, thus leaving considerable margins of uncertainty on the rope’s condition. To address this shortcoming, this article explores the possibility of estimating fatigue damage from the impact force on the rope. This value is estimated from the measurements of the climber’s acceleration using a wearable device. Then, force data are correlated to the fatigue characteristic of the rope. In this study, three ropes were used by professional climbers through different routes. After this field conditioning, the ropes were tested following the UIAA standard and compared to a control rope. The results show that the proposed method can estimate the rope cumulative damage, but it relies on the accuracy of the damage model. In particular, the parameter describing the contact between the rope and the runner is important for a correct estimate.

Ageing of climbing ropes with and without hydrophobic coating

“…To put the present results (maximum force approximately 6 kN) in context, for the half ropes, the maximum force in the first UIAA standard drop must be lower than 8 kN. Other studies showed an increase of approximately 11%-23% during the second drop after the first drop was conducted [46][47][48] and an increase of approximately 5%-11% in the case of wet ropes, 9,11 depending on the rope. 2.…”