Faced with the need to exploit off-shore oil fields at ever increasing depths, lighter replacements are being considered for the standard steel cable mooring systems used for platforms. This study considers the mechanical behaviour of synthetic ropes made of two different materials: PET and PEN. The first is already used in ropes to replace steel, and the second could be a potential competitor. A multi-scale study, involving mechanical tests (mainly tensile, creep and cyclic loading) has been carried out on assemblies of various sizes, from ropes of several hundreds kN breaking load to their smallest components: filaments. Strong correlations were found between the quasi-static behaviour of assemblies and the behaviour of filaments, which in itself is... |