Abstract. Braided wire rope has been widely used because of its high strength and high twist resistance, and its safety performance in service has been paid more and more attention.Based on the reasonable simplification of the wire rope, resorting to ellipse Four-Center-Arcs method, the deformation of the rope strands under tensile Load was analyzed. And on this basis, the mechanical model of braided wire rope under axial load was established. The stress, strain and the change curve of strand segments under different tensile loads were obtained by the numerical calculation with Matlab software. Calculation results show that: the axial stresses and strains of strand segments located on the small arc are less than that of the large arc. However, the corresponding shear stresses are greater than that of the large arc.