MATERIAL PROPERTIES AND PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERN SYNTHETIC FIBER ROPES

PART I: ABRASION RESISTANCE, CUT RESISTANCE, AND COEFFICIENT OF FRICTION

*Abrasives are exceptionally hard particles or surfaces with high roughness (i.e., pronounced surface irregularities) that significantly accelerate the mechanical wear of textile materials.

*Elastic recovery describes a material’s ability to return to its original length after unloading. It is defined as the ratio of elastic elongation to total elongation, expressed as a percentage.

**In solid mechanics, toughness refers to a material’s capacity to absorb mechanical energy before fracturing. It depends on both strength (resistance to failure under applied load) and plasticity (the ability to undergo permanent deformation prior to fracture).

In textile engineering, fiber toughness is commonly characterized by the work of rupture, defined as the total energy absorbed before tensile failure. This value corresponds to the area under the stress–strain curve and is measured in units of energy (e.g., joules or N·cm). When normalized by linear density, it is referred to as the specific work of rupture and expressed in N/tex.

*Cohesion (from Latin cohaesus, meaning “bound” or “connected”) describes the intermolecular forces binding a homogeneous material together. It reflects the intrinsic strength of the material and its ability to resist external mechanical influences.

*Plasticizer — a substance that increases the plasticity and elasticity of a polymer.

**Hydrolysis — a chemical reaction between a substance and water that leads to molecular bond degradation and the formation of new compounds.

To keep this article broadly applicable, we deliberately focused on polymer properties and the textile characteristics of materials rather than the detailed design of finished ropes. For this reason, rope construction itself is not listed among the primary abrasion-related factors.

That said, readers specifically interested in ropes should also consider numerous construction-related parameters when evaluating abrasion resistance and other performance characteristics. These include rope type (twisted or braided), strand twist count and tension, braiding pattern and angle, core-to-sheath ratio and interaction, as well as many other design features.

*Normal force is the force acting perpendicular to the contact surface between two bodies and represents the reaction of the surface to an applied load.

**Viscoelasticity describes the ability of a material to exhibit both elastic deformation and viscous flow, depending on the duration and nature of the applied load.

*Brittleness is the tendency of a material to fracture without significant plastic deformation. Opposite of plasticity.

**Brittle fracture is a type of failure in which the material exhibits little or no plastic or elastic deformation. Because the material cannot redistribute stress, even a small crack in a loaded area can propagate rapidly, potentially leading to catastrophic failure.

It is important to note that a product’s size or diameter (e.g., a rope) does not directly determine its cut resistance. These dimensions only indirectly indicate the energy and work needed for cutting, as the blade must traverse a distance proportional to the material’s thickness. In other words, a thicker material does not inherently resist cutting better, but it extends the blade’s path, increasing the energy and time required for severing.

*Anisotropy (from Ancient Greek ἄνισος — unequal, and τρόπος — direction) describes the dependence of material properties on direction; its opposite is isotropy.

*Standard deviation is the most common measure of dispersion relative to the mean.

**Coefficient of variation, or relative standard deviation, is a normalized measure of data dispersion expressed as a percentage and calculated as the ratio of standard deviation to the mean.