Lift Report

The amount of residential space constructed in mainland China came to 2.3 billion square meters in the year 2007. This gave rise to the world’s largest market volume for elevator products. Statistical surveys show that a total of 216,000 lifts and escalators were produced in China, representing a 29% growth rate when compared with the previous year. Figure 1 shows the rising trend in elevator production.

Conventional elevator control concepts dissipate braking energy unused and consume great amounts of electricity when in the standby mode. Both these drawbacks can be eliminated by changing to current inverters – and that means greater energy efficiency. A pilot plant was used to demonstrate this.

Nowadays emerging camera technologies facilitate different new applications in elevator technology, which enhance the elevator performance, security, and comfort. For the elevator’s performance optimization the level of occupancy in the car is a key figure. Existing overload sensing devices measure the weight of the elevator carload for safety reason but cannot detect the occupancy level of the car. For security applications a presence detection of persons and objects in the car is needed. Standard intrusion sensors are not applicable since they don’t detect non-moving objects. This paper describes new low cost vision systems based on standard CMOS camera technology, which provide solutions to elevator’s performance and security applications. A possible application to enhance to passenger’s comfort is shown. The new camera based sensor technology is explained and the different applications are discussed.

If you want to report about a lift exhibition held in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) one cannot fail to notice and include what is going on in the surroundings of this event.

With its strong growth rates India as a runner-up to China is considered to be the market of the future with the highest potential – also for German business enterprises. But unlike China, the development of the Indian market is spurred by the domestic demand.