"Current methods of inspecting wire rope for broken wires or excessive wear include visual inspection, physical measurements of rope diameter, and electromagnetic nondestructive testing (NDT). An off-the-shelf data acquisition and analysis system was tested in a U.S. Bureau of Mines laboratory using a continuous loop of wire rope containing fabricated flaws. The test rope was run through a commercially available NDT instrument. The output of the instrument, normally connected to a paper strip chart recorder, was digitized and analyzed with a personal computer. These initial tests were successful in showing that the use of a computer can improve current methods of NDT waveform collection and analysis." - NIOSHTIC-2 NIOSHTIC no. 10012226

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health