The service conditions of the rope from the Space Mountain rope-drive at Euro Disney are discussed. These ropes are discarded after about 3 months and 120,000 catapult operations, a figure which was predicted in the design phase using modern wire rope endurance prediction methods. Every rope section is subjected to the same conditions every 36 seconds, the mode of operation never changes. Some rope sections are only subjected to tension- tension fatigue, others to tension- tension and bending fatigue. Daily visual rope inspections and magnetic rope testing at regular intervals, as well as destructive rope tests after discard, provide an enormous amount of “real life“ data which has been compared with the theoretical predictions. The paper also presents a method of determining the most favourable length of rope to slip and cut and discuss the results of this procedure.
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Concluding remarks
The authors would like to thank Euro Disney for building the Space Mountain wire rope test machine. We would not have had the 120 million dollars required to do so. The readers should not miss the opportunity to visit Space Mountain. It is a good excuse to go to Paris in order to do some rope research.
