Traditional cleaning processes may be banned in the near future because of the hazards they pose to the environment. In this study, a water jet was used to clean grease residues from steel wires for the first time. The EDS and SEM results of the steel wire rope surfaces and supplementary water jet impact experiments on galvanized steel plates revealed that when the pressure was lower than 50 MPa and the traverse speed was higher than 600 mm/min, the water jet caused minimal damage to the coating. When the pressure was 5 MPa, the cleaning ratio was between 45 and 60%, and the level of cleaning increased with increasing pressure. Two proposed concepts of exposure ratio and nonexposed area were applied to quantitatively analyze the theoretical upper and lower limits for grease that could be cleaned from two typical structures. The results showed that the lower and upper cleaning limits for structure 7 × 3 were 38.1% and 83.3%, while the lower and upper limits for structure 1 × 3 + 5 × 7 were 35.5% and 59.2%, respectively. This result explains why the grease content of structure 7 × 3 was lower than that of structure 1 × 3 + 5 × 7 after cleaning. In addition, the adhesion test results showed that adhesion to the two kinds of steel wire ropes after cleaning was increased by 126% and 145.71%, respectively, which means that additional processes for improving adhesion could be omitted after using a water jet for cleaning. This is an advantage that traditional cleaning processes do not offer.
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