However, as an engineering load-bearing component, steel wire ropes are often affected by harsh working conditions such as bending fatigue, abrasion, corrosion, and mechanical impact during the work process. Damage such as broken wires, abrasion, and rust will inevitably occur.  Without reasonable maintenance and regular testing, the service life of wire rope will be shortened, and even cause rope breakage accidents, which will directly affect life safety and the normal order of production.
       

In August 2022, an construction company introduced TST real-time online flaw detection system on the tower cranes. It used NDT technology to confirm the internal and external conditions of wire rope, and scientifically formulate maintenance and rope replacement plans for companies.

During the after-sales visit, engineers from Luoyang TST Flaw Detection technology Co., Ltd learned that a hoisting wire rope that was originally designed to have a service life of one year, but in the actual use, only lasted about six months before needing to be replaced. This situation did not cause too much concern in the company.

But TST engineers questioned: "What is the problem?"       

After repeated manual checking, and relying on the powerful data processing capabilities of TST's real-time online flaw detection system, the problem was finally discovered - the hoisting pulley assembly had serious friction with the steel wire rope, which caused excessive wear and tear.  

"It needs to change! Regularly replace pulley components with better anti-wear performance"     

After identifying the reason, TST engineers promptly communicated with the customer and successfully extended the service life of the wire rope to one year. This alone saves more than 30,000USD every year for clients.

Before TST real-time online flaw detection system introduction, most companies still used manual visual inspection. Full-time inspectors used rags, gloves, flashlights, mirrors, etc. to inspect the wire ropes in use, and used calipers to measure the rope diameter and then make status judgment based on experience. Manual observation can only detect the external defects of the steel wire rope, but cannot do anything about the internal defects. Moreover, when there is oil stain on the surface, it is more difficult to detect the wire rope damage.

Obviously, the traditional manual visual inspection method is time-consuming and laborious, and is also affected by the experience and subjective will of the inspection personnel. The reliability of the inspection results is very low.

In addition, during manual inspection in the past, many departments using wire ropes adopted regular replacement methods. That is, the wire ropes were forcibly replaced regardless of their damage status after running for a certain time or running for a certain number of cycles or lifting a certain weight. This method of replacing not only fails to ensure the safe operation of the wire rope during its service life, but also causes huge waste due to premature scrapping.
 

TST engineers always emphasized to customers during the installation work: by introducing the TST real-time online flaw detection system, following standardized operations and ensuring adequate lubrication, the originally expected service life of the wire rope was 24 months, which can be extended to 28 months or even 36 months.

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