Abstract
Fall accidents account for the highest accident fatality rate in the construction industry. In addition, wearing and using a safety belt is the most realistic and important preventive measure to reduce fall accidents. Safety belts are protective devices worn by individual workers; they prevent workers from falling and allow for time to rescue the workers. However, the legal standards for safety belts only stipulate the materials, specifications, and strength of parts; there is no provision for an auxiliary rope fixing method to fix the safety belts safely. Due to this reason, workers in industrial sites arbitrarily fix and use the auxiliary rope. Currently, the most used method to fix the auxiliary rope is to tie a knot, which significantly lowers the strength of the material compared to the standard strength. Moreover, many construction sites are located outdoors, so the strength of the materials used in the auxiliary rope is inevitably reduced due to various external environmental conditions. Therefore, to solve this problem, this study was conducted to evaluate the strength of the material of the auxiliary rope for fixing the safety belt and the knot-tying method for the auxiliary rope. In this study, the exposure conditions for the effects of temperature and moisture were set to reflect the characteristics of the construction industry. The results of this study are expected to be used for standards establishment and the safe use of the auxiliary rope for safety belts in actual field applications.