Date of Award
5-1-2010
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Civil Engineering
First Advisor
Butson, Gary
Abstract
Visual inspection is the current method for determining if a wire rope needs to be removed from service. It can be time consuming and inaccurate. The point of this research is to prove that vibration testing could be used on rope to find damage. For this research, capacitive accelerometers were used. A program ran a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) as the main analysis. From the data produced, it was determined that a damaged rope's vibration signature was different from the vibration signature of the undamaged rope. There were four different types of vibrations used: an impulse while measuring the axial response, a harmonic excitation while measuring the axial response and both transverses directions. The impulse did not provide consistent results to adequately find damage with an acceptable degree of confidence. The harmonic excitations did provide results that showed a different signature. This was the case for all three directions measured. As a result, it was determined that vibrations can be used to find damage in a wire rope.
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