Reengineering elevators could transform21st-century cities7 August 2017, by Antony Wood And Dario Trabucco

Can technology free elevators from their up-downcages? Credit: SIAATH/Shutterstock.com

In the 160 or so years since the first skyscraperswere built, technological innovations of many kindshave allowed us to build them to reach astonishingheights. Today there is a 1,000-meter (167-story)building under construction in Jeddah, SaudiArabia. Even taller buildings are possible with today's structural technology.

But people still don't really live in skyscrapers theway futurists had envisioned, for one reason:Elevators go only up and down. In the "HarryPotter" movies, "Charlie and the ChocolateFactory" and others, we see cableless boxes thatcan travel not just vertically but horizontally andeven diagonally. Today, that future might be closerthan ever. A new system invented and beingtested by German elevator producer ThyssenKrupp would get rid of cables altogetherand build elevators more like magnetic levitationtrains, which are common in Japan and China.

Our work at the nonprofit Council on Tall Buildingsand Urban Habitat studies how tall buildings canbetter interact with their urban environments. Oneaspect is a look at how buildings might work in aworld of ropeless elevators. We imagine thatpeople might live, say, on the 50th floor of a tall

building and only rarely have to go all the way downto street level. Instead, they might go sideways tothe next tower over, or to the bridge between them,for a swim, a trip to the doctor or the grocery store.

This research project, set to conclude in September2018, will explore as many of the practicalimplications of ropeless elevator travel as possible.But we already know that thinking of elevators theway ThyssenKrupp suggests could revolutionizethe construction and use of tall buildings. Builderscould create structures that are both far taller andfar wider than current skyscrapers – and peoplecould move though them much more easily than wedo in cities today.

A wide-angle view of an elevator machine room showsthe large spool to wind and unwind the ropes. Credit:Dennis van Zuijlekom, CC BY-SA

It's hard to get high

Very few buildings are taller than 500 metersbecause of the limitations of those everyday

1 / 4

devices that make high-rise buildings practical in thefirst place – elevators. Traditional, steel-rope-hungelevators can travel only around 500 meters beforethe weight of the rope itself makes it inconvenient.That takes more and more energy and space –which all costs developers money.

Replacing steel cables with carbon fiber ones cansave energy and space. But even so, people whowant to go to the uppermost floors from the lowestfloors don't want to wait for the elevator to stop atthe dozens of floors in between. That meansdevelopers need to make room in their buildings formultiple shafts, for express and local elevators, andfor "sky lobbies" where people can switch betweenthem. All of that space devoted to verticaltransportation reduces the amount of rentablespace on each floor, which makes the economics ofthe building more difficult the higher it gets.

Traveling in three dimensions

A new elevator system uses electric linear inductionmotors – the same kind of contactless energytransfer that powers magnetic levitation trains –instead of cables to move elevator cars around.This also lets them move independently of eachother in a shaft, which in turn means multiplecabins can be working in one shaft at the sametime. That reduces the need for parallel shaftsserving different floors and frees up more realestate for commercial use. And there's no inherentlimit to how far they can travel.

Without cables, cars can move horizontally and shareshafts and passageways through buildings. Credit:ThyssenKrupp, CC BY-ND

Even more exciting is that these cabins can travelhorizontally, and potentially even diagonally: Themotors pivot to follow the powered track, while thefloor of the cabin remains level. That opens up awhole world of possibilities. Without the cables, it isalso feasible to reduce the number of shafts abuilding requires, by allowing more cars to travel inone single shaft. It also becomes feasible to buildmassive building complexes interconnected bymotorized vehicles operating high above theground.

The difference between an elevator and a car, oreven a train, becomes less clear – as does thedifference between a building, a bridge and anentire city. Instead of descending from your 50th-floor apartment to the street in an elevator, thentaking a taxi or the subway to another buildingacross town, and going back up to the 50th floor,you might instead have a door-to-door ride betweenbuildings, at height, in a single vehicle.

2 / 4

Creating the cities of the future

Is the world actually ready for this? Probably notright away. In the short term, we can expect to seesystems like carbon-fiber-roped and ropelesselevators used in some of the very tallest, mosthigh-profile (and expensive) buildings. Many ofthese structures house spaces used for manydifferent purposes – residences, restaurants, retailstores, offices, cinemas and even sports. Thepeople who live in, work in or visit those buildingshave a wide range of destinations – they mightwant to stop at a shop to pick up something beforegoing to a friend's apartment for dinner beforeheading to a movie. And so they need options fortraveling within the building.

At the moment, these systems are far moreexpensive than the conventional alternatives.Building owners won't use them until they can save– or earn – lots more money by building systemslike this. But as we've seen with computers andmany other forms of technology, the cost goesdown rapidly as more people buy the systems, andas research advances improve them.

There are probably physical constraints andefficiency limits on how many elevator cars couldshare a particular complex of shafts andpassageways. And structural engineers might needto analyze what supports and reinforcements areneeded to move people and machinery throughoutlarge buildings. But the tall building industry has nostandard data or recommendations to guidedesigners today. That's what we're trying todevelop.

The technology is arriving – and with them thecertainty that the old ways of traveling through abuilding are about to change more substantiallythan ever before.

This article was originally published on TheConversation. Read the original article.

Provided by The ConversationAPA citation: Reengineering elevators could transform 21st-century cities (2017, August 7) retrieved 17May 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2017-08-reengineering-elevators-21st-century-cities.html

3 / 4

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, nopart may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

4 / 4