Nowadays, the use of synthetic ropes for offshore platforms anchorage in deep and ultra deep
water is a common practice. Despite these ropes have been used for more than 10 years, they are still an active
field of theoretical and experimental research. Nevertheless, little is known about the mechanical strength of the
jackets of those ropes.
Although there are many materials in which jackets of ropes can be made, in most cases the same material of
the subrope is used for the manufacturing, it may lead to unnecessary costs and it adds nothing to the
mechanical strength of the rope. Therefore, it’s necessary to look for answers - taking into account the wearing
resistance - of jackets made from different materials so that we can drop the cost of the rope in a secure way.
It’s also important to known the degraded jackets behavior, and also that the ropes are not always been used in
the best conditions (new ropes).
The same test methodology used for Rodriguez, N. P. et alii, OMAE, 2006. is applied in this paper, which aims
at comparing those results with this found for degraded jackets submitted to the environment action (sun,
humidity, rain) for 18 months.