Wire ropes are used in various applications starting from bicycles, automobiles to aircrafts for their control, in shipping as mooring lines for off-shore oil exploration and drilling, in oil wells and oil well drilling, in winches and ropeways for forestry and agriculture, in aerial ropeways for haulage purposes, in suspension bridges, in elevators, in lifts and in number of other general applications. In mining, steel wire ropes are used for man-riding haulages and for winding. The quality of the wire rope is important particularly in man-riding haulages as snapping of ropes may involve many casualties in underground mining. In any winding installation of mines, hundreds of people are hoisted up and down all through the mining operation; the weakest link in the system is the wire rope due to its continuous wear and tear in different environmental conditions and loading patterns in which it is operated. Sometimes even a factor of safety of 10 is found to be disastrous in such a situation. As per the statistics available, there have been a number of cases of wire ropes snapping during hoisting including in man-riding haulages.
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