New standards and guidelines bring fiber ropes into the 21st century

The expanding need for stronger, safer, more versatile and easy-to-handle strength members for marine-related operations has resulted in an increasing focus on fiber ropes. Fiber rope strength members have continually improved their capabilities, especially in the last ten years. This has required the need for more information on their use, including standards that provide better selection data and testing procedures that allow the quality of ropes to be effectively assessed and better data to be generated. In the USA and Canada standards must address a wide range of markets from the farm and household user to the most sophisticated marine application. The standards also need to provide critical safety information, such as the use of responsible design factors and working load limits (WLL). It is also important that fiber rope standards be complemented with basic technical and application information to educate intermediaries and users.