Investigation on Bending over Sheave Fatigue Life Determination of Rotation Resistant Steel Wire Rope Y.A. Onur 1 & C.E. İmrak 2 & T.Ö. Onur 1 Received: 26 February 2017 /Accepted: 31 May 2017 # The Society for Experimental Mechanics, Inc 2017 Abstract Investigation on theoretical and experimental deter- mination of bending over sheave fatigue lifetimes of rotation resistant steel wire ropes has been conducted. Effects of sheave size and tensile load on bending over sheave fatigue lifetimes of investigated rope have been presented. Bending over sheave fatigue life prediction according to effects of ten- sile load and sheave diameter has been presented by using artificial neural networks. The results point out that construct- ed ANN model estimations and experimental results have powerful correlation. Keywords Bending over sheave fatigue . Rotation resistant rope . Artificial neural networks . Fatigue life Introduction Steel wire ropes are commonly preferred hoisting members in vast variety of application such as elevators, cranes, mine hoistings and bridges. Steel wire ropes have many helical wires that are wrapped to the fibre or wire core in order to form a strand. In fact, rope geometry is formed by twisting strands around a core where core types are fibre or steel. Great attentions are given to the rope technology area since crucial carrying duty is fulfilled in the installations. Ropes are ex- posed to fatigue substantially as either ropes incur to the alter- ing loads with time as bridge or repetitive bending- straightening move on the sheaves as cranes. First fatigue type is tension-tension fatigue where rope is subjected to altering tensile load. Second fatigue type is bending over sheave fa- tigue where ropes incur to the repetitive bending together with static tensile load. Dynamic rope testing rigs including two different stress regimes which are tension fatigue and bending over sheave fatigue have been shown in Fig. 1. F denotes tensile load applied upon rope specimen and ΔF denotes load fluctuation amount with time in Fig. 1 when rope is subjected tension-tension fatigue. Many studies have been performed for identifying effect of bending over sheave fatigue on rope fatigue lifetime [1–4]. Ridge et al. [2] assessed effects of sim- ulated degradations (wire breaks, abrasive wear, slack wires, slack strands, plastic wear, corrosion, torsional imbalance) to the steel wire rope lifetime. Urchegui et al. [5] examined wear evolution in a 6 × 19 Seale stranded rope exposed to bending fatigue. Torkar and Arzensek [6] performed bending fatigue tests of wires located in outer strands of 6 × 19 Seale rope. Gorbatov et al. [7] investigated effects of some parameters (core type, lubricant type, tensile load) to the bending fatigue life of 6 × 36 Warrington-Seale rope with 16 mm diameter. Feyrer’ s book [8] presented state of art review and experimen- tal test results of ropes exposed to bending over sheave fa- tigue. Author examined effects of various parameters (rope core type, lubrication, tensile load, bending length, sheave diameter, zinc coating, sheave geometry and material, side deflection, winding angle) to the rope bending over sheave fatigue lifetime. Giglio and Manes [9] investigated rope wind- ing angle effect to the bending fatigue life of 19 × 7 non- rotating aircraft rescue hoists rope. Argatov et al. [10] focused on fretting wear degradation during service life of wires of steel wire ropes. Evolution of linear wear scars on the central wire of the core. Custom-made bending over sheave fatigue test bench was used by authors. Authors concluded that en- durance reduces approximately same rate along with increase in wear severity, reduction of sheave diameter increases * Y.A. Onur aytaconur@hotmail.com 1 Bulent Ecevit University, 67100 Zonguldak, Turkey 2 Istanbul Technical University, 34437 Istanbul, Turkey Exp Tech DOI 10.1007/s40799-017-0188-z