helicopter winch cable dimensions+materials
 

Hello, we are a group of aerospace students, that were assigned to design a helicopter lifting winch (rescue hoist).

We are specified the length of the rope is 60 meters, the helicopter hovers at a height of maximum 30 meters and the maximum steady state weight to be lifted is 500 kg.

We did some online searching and got some hits (like ropes made by MASTER-PULL), but we are not sure we are looking at the right kind of ropes for our winch.

Can you guys maybe point us to company websites which sell rope specifically made for rescue hoists, and have more or less detailed spec sheets?

Also for design purposes, we would like the rope to have a diameter of 3-5 mm, but in pictures and videos we found, the rope looks somewhat thicker. Mechanically, from the materials we found online, there seems to be no problem of supporting the specified weight using 3-5 mm diameters, but is there another reason why they will not be viable in practice?

thank you very much for any help.

Naturally you have read closely Michael Markey's chapter 10:
http://www.unols.org%2Fpublications%...um_winches.pdf

And I assume that you have done the computations like Fermat:
Calculating Tension in Cable - Single Post

And I look forward to your discussion of the effect of dynamic loading on the cable size.

You do not use rope for winching; steel cable...