Study of the rope nonlinear creep behaviors and its influencing factors in the assembly of sheave drives

From three aspects of the stress, temperature, and time, rope creep research is often carried out based on its own ontology without various operation conditions. Thus, it is difficult to accurately reflect its creep behavior in real working conditions. The rope creep, caused by the preload for a long time, will affect the assembly and working synchronous accuracy of sheave drives in the assembly of docking mechanisms. However, it is quite difficult to analyze the rope creep behavior only with simple creep phenomenon, and the experiments still play an important role in obtaining uncertain creep information. In this paper, to study the rope creep behavior of sheave drives in assembling the docking mechanisms, a creep constitutive model is built based on the experimental creep data by the modified Norton–Bailey equation. Also, the rope creep strain laws, affected by the operating conditions, are analyzed. This lays a foundation for improving the assembly efficiency and precision compensation of the serial sheave drives. Experiments validated the effectiveness of the model.