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Surface wear is an inevitable damage of wire ropes used in winding hoist. It always reduces the service life of the wire rope and threatens the mine safety. The characteristics of the surface wear scar caused by sliding contact between ropes were discussed in a quantitative and qualitative method for this paper. A series of breaking tensile tests were carried out to investigate the effects of the wear characteristic parameters on the bearing capacity of the rope. Furthermore, the fracture failure behaviors of the rope with different wear scars were analyzed. Results show that the wear scar changes from distributing on one strand to evenly distributed on two adjacent strands as the sliding wear position changes from the strand peak to valley. When the wear region concentrates on one strand, the maximum wear depth increases from approximately 0.46 mm to approximately 0.64 mm with the increase of wear area. Broken wires seriously affect the elongation and breaking force of the rope. The maximum breaking force is approximately 42 KN and the maximum local elongation is approximately 1.5 mm under the condition of broken wires. Additionally, the external wires of the strand are easier to fracture caused by torsion and tension together. Furthermore, the shear lip and the fibre region on the fracture surface of the wires become not very obvious with the increase of the wear scar parameters.

Wear problems exist in multi-layer windings of ultra-deep coal mine hoisting ropes that are wound around drums. Wear decreases the life of such hoisting ropes directly, and that in turn threatens mine safety. An investigation of winding hoisting ropes was conducted using a custom test rig to study the effects of different contact loads, crossing angles and displacement amplitudes on rope friction and wear. Results show that the coefficient of friction (COF) in the steady-state period changes very little with an increase in contact load and that it stabilizes at about 0.61. Additionally, the COF slightly decreases with an increase of crossing angle. As the amplitude of sliding motion increases to 30 mm and 50 mm, the COF increases linearly. Using thermal imaging, the temperature rise in the steady-state period increases with the contact load and crossing angle. Moreover, the maximum wear depth increases linearly with an increase of contact load. Nevertheless, the wear depth changed very little when the amplitude is less than 30 mm, but it increases rapidly until an amplitude of 70 mm. The major wear mechanisms of ropes without lubrication include adhesive wear, abrasive wear and fatigue wear.