Promills: Compacting of wire ropes

What is the matter? A normal strand (not compacted) is made of round wires twisted around the same longitudinal axis. By analyzing its section we note that there is basically a metallic area plus an empty space normally filled of lubricant and/or textiles fibers.
While working, the wires slide among them along an ideal point of contact.
The wear is very fast and this produces an elongation of the rope that reduces its life. How to improve?
Since many years the compacting has been introduced.
By this operation, the round section of each wire is deformed until the point of contact becomes a line. This means that: Compaction of the wire ropes a) all the efforts are distributed on a surface instead of a line b) the metallic area and consequently the rope capacity increases
c) the external surface is more regular (less wear on the wheels) promills compacted How to do it?
Just at the beginning the easier method was passing the rope through a die made of 2 shells.
This die was put at the end of the strander line after the forming cone.
But this old method gerated high temperatures (more than 30% of power consumption), limitation of the speed and over all frequent breaking of some component of the rope. This last problem involved long wait time to re-start by loosing a lot of production. What is the “state of the art” now ?
Since more than 30 years the 'ROLLING CASSETTES' appeared on the market as an evolution of the more monolithic 'Turk Heads'. At the beginning they were applied to the classic wire field to suit special solid profiles. The application to the wire rope compacting arrives just at the end of the 90's. In short the same theory of the wire section deforming was applied to the rope compacting.
Today, thanks to the cooperation with great companies along many years, Promills is able to build and supply a variety of rolling cassettes to compact ropes of any composition within the range Ø1,7 – Ø25 mm.