Experimental investigation of spooling test on the multilayer oceanographic winch with high-performance synthetic fibre rope

Compared with steel wire ropes, synthetic fibre ropes have a better performance in deep sea and gradually replaced the former in subsea launch and recovery systems. However, serious damage will be introduced to the winch structure when synthetic fibre ropes wound in multiple layers on the winch drum. In order to comprehensively explore the relationship between the mechanical properties of the winch drum barrel and the synthetic fibre rope, biaxial strain gauges and laser profile scanners have been used to monitor the oceanographic winch using a high-modulus polyethylene (HMPE) rope with the length of 13000 m. The full-size test rig was first introduced as an attempt to quantify the effect of winding fibre rope and evaluate the stresses on the winch with multilayer winding fibre rope. The results reveal that a loss elimination effect on rope windings may occur during the spooling experiment of fibre rope owing to the hysteresis property of the fibre, which differs significantly from the results published previously. Moreover, a more concise winding model is developed to estimate the spoolingand deformation states of the synthetic fibre rope, which can well simulate the cross-section deformation of the wound HMPE rope. •The full-scale test rig, an oceanographic multilayer winch with a length of 13000 m fibre rope was used.•The mechanical properties of the winch drum barrel with fibre rope was investigated through a full-scale spooling experiment.•The loss elimination effect on the fibre rope windings has been found to occur on the surface of multilayer winch drum.•The results of the numerical simulation were compared with the maximum equivalent stresses measured in the investigation.•A winding model was newly proposed to estimate the winding and deformation states of the synthetic fibre rope.