Structural Steel Cables
This information reflects our best understanding of product composition in 2015.
Structural steel cables can be used for a number of architectural and engineering purposes. They hold up glazed walls and roofs, tensile fabric architecture, suspension bridges, and other architectural features. This survey focused on full-locked...
Structural steel cables can be used for a number of architectural and engineering purposes. They hold up glazed walls and roofs, tensile fabric architecture, suspension bridges, and other architectural features. This survey focused on full-locked structural steel cables; this type of structural steel cable is less flexible than open spiral strand steel cables, but allows for higher loads. The base of full-locked structural steel cables is a round inner core comprising of multiple Galfan-coated carbon steel wires. Outside the inner core Galfan-coated z-profile wires are stranded together to form layers of interlocking wires. As the inner core wires are stranded together during the manufacturing process, a zinc-rich blocking compound or a petrochemical lubricant (and sometimes both) may be used to keep the wires from scraping against each other and as an anti-corrosive agent. For this survey, zinc-rich blocking compounds were found to be more commonly used than petrochemical lubricants. For full-locked cables, "dry-stranding" (stranding together the Galfan-coated z-profile wires without lubricant or blocking compound) of the exterior layers was found to be most common.