Building the foundation for the use of fiber rope in cranes for tall wind turbines

In this project, Liftra ApS (Liftra), Dynamica Ropes ApS (Dynamica), and Aalborg University (AAU) will build the foundation for the use of fiber rope in cranes for tall wind turbines. By enabling the use of fiber rope, which is a much lighter alternative to steel wire ropes, Liftra’s crane systems will be able to operate at their full capacity on turbines with hub heights exceeding 200 meters. Today, this is not possible due to insufficient knowledge about safety factors and fatigue development in fiber ropes in crane systems. Current guidelines suggest that the safety factor must be 3 at the end of the use. However, it is unclear what the initial safety factor should be to ensure a post-use safety factor of 3, as the fatigue development cannot be assessed analytically. This project intends to overcome this challenge by researching the use of fiber rope in crane systems to ultimately allow for analytically assessing fatigue development and post-operation safety factors in fiber rope. The project will be concluded with a demonstration of a Liftra crane equipped with fiber rope and the machine learning monitoring system.