Replacing steel wire rope with a fiber rope product eliminates safety hazards and enables faster and safer container handling.
By Keith Rowsey
Canada’s oil producing region is a land of extremes, with drastic seasonal variations in weather commonplace, and bountiful wildlife prevalent. These conditions require business operations to take personnel and environmental safety decisions very seriously, as risks are magnified in climates experiencing such severity.
Stony Mountain Waste Management provides full-service waste management solutions for hazardous and non-hazardous materials throughout the western province of Alberta. Their industrial, commercial and residential services include: hazardous/non-hazardous waste management, oilfield drilling wastes, sewage and portable water services. Due to its location in the center of such a harsh climate, the company takes additional precautions in order to ensure the safety of employees, clients and the public. “An injury to a customer is an injury we have to bear as well,” says Stony Mountain’s Health, Safety and Environmental Manager, Eugene Thiessen, “which is why we want to eliminate hazards wherever we can.”
From Steel to Synthetic
In one such instance, that meant switching from steel-wire rope to synthetic rope made with Dyneema® to operate the winch system that controls the heavy lids on top of Stony Mountain’s waste bins. The change occurred after a wire rope frayed, leaving employees susceptible to a hand injury if the sharp strand penetrated through a worker’s glove. “Steel wire rope tends to fray and, once it does, it immediately becomes a hazard. The opportunity to eliminate that hazard with a fiber rope product was something I was very interested in,” says Thiessen.
DSM Dyneema (Stanley, NC) is the inventor and manufacturer of Ultra High Molecular Weight PolyEthylene (UHMWPE) fiber branded as Dyneema®, the world’s strongest fiber™. Dyneema® offers maximum strength combined with minimum weight. It is up to 15 times stronger than quality steel and up to 40 percent stronger than aramid fibers, both on weight for weight basis. Dyneema® fiber floats on water and is extremely durable and resistant to moisture, UV light and chemicals. The applications are therefore more or less unlimited. Dyneema® is an important component in ropes, cables and nets in the fishing, shipping and offshore industries.
The inherent properties of Dyneema® make it stronger than steel, yet seven times lighter, which enables faster and safer handling. Additionally, ropes made with Dyneema® are more durable, UV and moisture resistant and show extraordinary performance even in extreme conditions. “When you’re sending a guy out with several feet of wire rope in the cold, it’s a dangerous and unpleasant experience,” says Thiessen. “With Dyneema®, temperature fluctuation and safety are no longer an issue. We’re already seeing greater longevity out of the product, which means fewer change outs and less downtime for our company.”
Improving Efficiency
Like many companies, Stony Mountain is continuously looking to improve efficiency and increase performance in order to deliver ongoing cost savings to their customers. “A synthetic rope that’s stronger and lasts longer than steel-wire is not only a hazard mitigation, but also an efficiency that was very easy to sell to upper management,” says Thiessen. “The ropes we’re buying now don’t fray and last 10 times longer than steel-wire.”
Not only do steel-wire ropes require additional manpower and larger equipment due to increased weight, but steel-wire rope breakage can also pose a serious risk as a result of its heavy and uneven breaking behavior. Consequently, when a steel-wire rope snaps, the combination of the enormous energy and heavy weight causes unpredictable recoil with incredible force, endangering operator safety. “With wire rope, you can’t gauge when it’s going to break—when it goes, it goes,” says Thiessen. “We did visual inspections of our steel-wire ropes daily—but we didn’t want workers handling the equipment because if the rope failed, it could mean a slice to the finger or an even more serious injury.”
Stony Mountain replaced three of their winch systems with SupreemX-12™, a 12-strand synthetic rope manufactured by Atlantic Braids out of Ontario, Canada, a company that has been manufacturing quality cordage for decades and evolving and innovating along the way. They have successfully made custom cordage for clients covering a very wide variety of purposes and their products have been thoroughly tested to deliver results.
SupreemX-12™ is known as a high strength cable replacement using Dyneema® SK78 fiber, which has very little stretch, low creep and torque free performance characteristics—making it ideal in winch, tow, rigging/control and utility lines.
A Major Asset
To date, the 5/16″ diameter SupreemX-12™ has performed without issue, and is a smaller diameter than the previous 3/8″ steel-wire rope, yet still provides 13 times the required break strength for the 1,000-pound pulley system. “Our customers and end users couldn’t believe a synthetic rope could replace steel,” says Thiessen, “we have brought high tech performance to a relatively low tech mechanism. It’s a major asset to Stony Mountain when our clients can see us proactively working to find innovative solutions that not only increase performance, but also eliminate risk.”
Nick Snow, the President of Atlantic Braids, echoes the benefits of synthetic ropes, crediting the successful implementation of SupreemX-12™ in Stony Mountain’s operations to Dyneema® fiber. “We work directly with DSM Dyneema’s engineers and technical experts to produce quality products that provide our customers with premium performance and, more importantly, peace of mind,” says Snow. “We can directly track the origins of the fiber, ensuring consistency in every rope we make.”
Stony Mountain has vowed to continue using synthetic rope made with Dyneema® in their operations. In fact, Thiessen says, “We have already repeated our order to ensure we don’t run out anytime soon!”
Keith Rowsey is an Applications Development and Technical Services Engineer for DSM Dyneema (Stanley, NC). He provides technical solutions to customers and end users to help introduce and implement Dyneema®, the world’s strongest fiberTM, into a variety of industrial and offshore markets. Keith can be reached at [email protected].