Product category:
Design and Development Consultancy
News Release from: Advanced Design Consulting
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 16 October 2003
Synthetic rope to integrate
"intelligence"
The US Navy has awarded a second-phase contract to Advanced Design Consulting to develop the strongest - and perhaps the smartest - synthetic rope yet for its vessels.
The US Navy hasn't reached the end of the rope It is just the beginning
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 13 Sep 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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The US Navy has awarded a second-phase contract to Advanced Design Consulting (ADC) of Lansing to develop the strongest - and perhaps the smartest - synthetic rope yet for its vessels.
Steel-wire rope offers unchanging strength for today's US Navy.
The metallic rope is used in ship-to-ship cargo loading.
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The problem with steel-wire rope is high maintenance costs, inflexibility, mechanical complexity and its heavy weight.
The engineers at ADC hope that synthetic-fibre rope will match the virtues of steel, but add flexibility, lighter weight and lower maintenance costs.
"We want to make a synthetic rope that is significantly more robust than existing ones", says Alex Deyhim, President of ADC.
"While approaching the strength and the resistance-to-damage of wire ropes, we hope to obtain the advantage of synthetic material".
ADC will test the bonding power of materials like nanofibres and biological polymers to learn whether artificially created strands work well in a large-rope structure.
The ADC engineers and scientists will look at the rope fibre at the molecular level, to understand how fibre atoms are bonded and to predict tensile strength when molecules are rearranged.
"The weakness of existing synthetic fibres arises from their one-dimensional nature", says Eric Johnson, VP of Research at ADC and the principal investigator on the project.
With synthetic strands, individual molecules are connected by hydrogen bonds, which have little strength.
Still using hydrogen bonding to connect the molecular chains, the ADC scientists hope to vary the orientation and increase the number of the hydrogen molecules.
This, they hope, could bring stronger fibres and rope.
ADC will also make and test nanofibres from ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene through a process called electrospinning.
Today, conventional nanofibres are made from high-performance polyethylene.
Eventually, says Deyhim, the ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene could be a substantial improvement over conventional fibres.
The company will also test rope-surface coatings and abrasion resistance that protects the rope from friction during use on sheaves, pulleys and bulwarks.
But friction and fibre are not ADC's only concerns.
The synthetic rope must endure the sun's ultraviolet radiation and it must resist the degrading effects of sea salt.
Deyhim says that the crystallisation of salt within rope can accelerate internal abrasion and wear out the inner rope faster.
To inspect wear and tear, ADC plans to embed sensors that provide an ability to continuously monitor rope fitness for breaks, kinks and cracks.
Says Deyhim: "We want to know what occurs inside the rope.
It will be a 'smart' rope, as we want to predict possible damage and the rope's remaining life".
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