E-Rope detects wear/breakage

[tomdarch]

Wired News has the following story:

http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282 ... _tophead_1

It's about a company called Squid Labs, and one of their products, a system for detecting stress and damage to ropes. Here's Squid Labs' page on the system:

http://www.squid-labs.com/projects/erope/index.html

For slightly more technical info, check out the "Electronic Rope: Load and Wear Monitoring" link. Basically they are putting a conductive material in the rope, and you can then run current through the material and get information about how much stress the rope is experiencing. Also, by running multiple strands in a rope, you can detect how many of the strands have been damaged and assess the condition of the rope.

This all sounded like a great thing for climbing ropes, until I remembered that climbing ropes are way, way stronger and more durable than we really need: no rope has ever 'just broken' under normal climbing use. (Ropes have been cut by sawing over edges or getting damaged by rockfall, but all a sensor could do in that situation would be to tell you "Beep! You're going to die! Beep!")

It's interesting, but for climbers, I'd guess that this technology would be primaiily used in rope R&D and setting standards for rope testing, rather than deployed on every-day climbers' ropes.

[dhoyne]

It might be a bit hard to plug the ends of your rope into some electric gadget at the crag too.