Should You Use Polypropylene as a Lifeline? Definitely Not!

摘要

This article arose from a simple question on the UK Caving forum about the use of polypropylene hawser-laid rope as a lifeline. The British Caving Association's rope test rig was used to run a quick drop test on a dry 12mm-diameter sample of polypropylene hawser-laid rope which demonstrated that the rope could not hold a single 0.80m fall factor (FF) 1.0 drop of a 100kg test mass. Unfortunately this single test provided no data on the margin of failure; did the rope only just fail, or was it totally inadequate for the task?