Lift Report

The Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors have had an important role in Elevator Drive applications, due to their inherent characteristics of controllability and reliability, and this role is increasing due to the development of new grades of Permanent Magnet using rare earth materials. In the design of the Permanent magnet Synchronous motors for Elevator Drive applications, the selection of the rotor type, Internal Permanent Magnet (IPM) or External Permanent Magnet (SPM) became a very important issue, because both configurations have advantages and disadvantages depending on the application. This paper makes a comparison between Synchronous Motors with rotors with IPM and SPM configurations, along with the use of different permanent Magnetic materials, in terms of motor performance, manufacturing, cost and reliability.

A logically operating safety gear can all of a sudden turn completely erratic. This paper explains the behaviour of friction, the effect of tolerances in friction, why erratic behaviour happens and what can be done to prevent erratic behaviour.

This article also explains what happens with triggering devices and how their operation can make safety gears even more erratic if not properly understood and wrong combinations are applied. This article also explains why EN 81 safety gear type tests are as stringent as they are, and also gives proposals for possible improvements to future elevator safety codes.

Elevators should be an integral part of a building transportation system. However, the integration of several transports and their ability to handle different kinds of passengers can usually be verified only in practice. Elevator planning typically assumes passengers with standard characteristics for one elevator group at a time. KONE Building Traffic Simulator (BTS) is able to simulate the traffic flow of a whole building with multiple transports. It also models the behavior of various passenger types, such as adults, children and disabled people. In this article, the BTS passenger model is described and simulation cases are used to show the effect of passenger modeling.

The operating sound of elevator components have become an important criteria of quality. With the development of innovative drive systems without machine rooms, the operating noise of all elevator components are easily transmitted to other floors, regardless of the actual mounting position of the drive. Today’s elevators, have to achieve an extremely low level of operating sound, in order to meet manufacturers requirements. However, quite often, different perceptions are present, when sounds levels are specified or compared.

Using the example of elevator brakes, this paper shall give an introduction on how switching noise is generated and what sound levels are currently achieved within the industry.

Furthermore the author refers to common pitfalls in measuring the noise level and summarize conditions that may change the operating noise. The paper concludes with a proposal to establish standardized conditions for the industry in order to receive comparable results.

Step and drive chains are essential parts of the drive system of escalators and moving walks. The wear life of a chain depends on different factors: operating and environment conditions, kind of lubrication. In many cases customer demands determine the use of a maintenance- free roller chain (lube-free type) or alternatively an automatic lubrication system for conventional chains. The lecture will give an overview to constructions, advantages and disadvantages. The comparison between maintenance free roller chain, conventional chain with automatic lubrication and conventional chain without lubrication consider under life cycle cost-savings, ecological and prime-cost aspects.

Elevators in mid and high-rise buildings take up a remarkable share of building dimensions at the core of the building. Using a double-deck design is one approach to improve this situation. But there are also some compromises having to do with this solution. The paper introduces a revolutionary approach to improving elevator handling capacity and at the same time taking up less space within buildings. While the idea itself may not be new or unhead of, on the other hand there has yet to be an installation of this kind introduced or implemented.

The CAN open communication system (EN-50 325-4) is the base of the DSP 417 application profile specification. This specification defines the communication interfaces of virtual lift control devices, e.g. motion controller, door unit, load sensors, panels and displays etc. The paper will introduce the basic features of the CAN open communication system and will discuss in detail the specified virtual devices. The application profile allows integrating a plug-and-play lift control system supporting up to 8 lift systems with 254 floors per lift. The paper allows will discuss how to enhance user-specific functions.

This new positioning system, basing on an object sound travel time measurement, is introduced and its working principle is explained. The technical data and advantages during installation and in operation of the two systems USP30 and USP100 are presented using several application examples. The paper closes with a perspective for future safety-related applications for position and velo city detection basing on this system.

The increasing demand of the European Market for traction MRL lifts, forced hydraulic lift manufactures to promote an alternative solution, the hydraulic MRL lifts. The probable location of the power unit inside the shaft, as well as the increasing issues of environmental acceptance, brings to the fore the use of a fire resistant Biodegradable hydraulic fl uid. A comparison between theory and praxis, of the use of water based and a water free hydraulic fluid, and their effects to lift performance (seals compatibility, oxidative and thermal stability, compressibility, travel comfort, operational temperature range, etc) is presented.

The last decade elevators without machine room became “status“ in the lift industry. Within ten years a great number of different solutions have been presented to the market. In some cases, the patent‘s nightmare from the multinationals has blocked a major number of such ideas, very sophisticated in some situations. A completely different approach for the idea of MRL elevator gave birth two years ago to APOLLO, a self propelled cabin with the machine intergraded in the car frame.

The idea of the APOLLO elevator and the fi rst results obtained from the experience of it‘s use, are presented here.

The performance and quality of work of lift and escalator contractors are the important foci for their clients as well as users to concern. In Hongkong, large scale lift and escalator contractors have already adopted a worldwide federation of national standard ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) to assess the organizations ability in order to meet customer, regulatory and the organizations own requirements.

However, ISO is not tailor-made for lift and escalator contractor to adopt. Some parties have established assessment system for their lift and escalator contractors to measure their performance and provide a practical means in guiding them for improvement in areas of weakness.

This paper introduces the objective, elements and penalty of the assessment systems and discusses them in detail.

1. Performance Monitoring Points System (PMPS) Electrical and Mechanical Services Department.

2. Maintenance Assessment Scoring System (MASS) & BSPASS Hongkong Housing Authority

3. Point Deduction System (PDS) MTR Corporation Limited.

Owing to the increasing density of super-high-rise buildings in megacities, the reliance on super-high-speed elevators is also increasing accordingly. However, there are technical problems, mainly mechanical or more specific, aerodynamic by nature, related to the development of such elevators, thus hindering the advancement of technology in this area. We can see a rough figure of around 2 m/s growth per decade, which cannot catch up with the requirement in the coming century. In Elevcon‘97, in Shanghai, a paper entitled “A 2-dimensional Aerodynamic Model for Super-high-speed Elevator Design“ was presented and subsequently, the paper was published in the International Journal of Elevator Engineering, Vol. 2. The paper presented results based on computer simulations. Now, we move from a computer simulation platform to an experimental platform. The experimental setup at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics is described in the paper and the method of using PIV to fi nd out the speed and pressure distribution profile of air around a moving car is highlighted. We have tried different external appearance of car design.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has developed a new traction machine for machine room-less elevators. The worldleading slim form factor provides for great convenience in layout design. In addition, the slim traction machine also runs smoothly, ensuring a comfortable ride, and can be manufactured with high productivity. This paper introduces the structure of this slim traction machine and the motor technology that made it possible.

As high-rise buildings have been realized in recent years, the requirement of super high-speed elevators is getting stronger. For the super high-speed elevators, the reduction of car lateral vibration during its operation is essential for excellent ride comfort. This paper describes the development of active vibration damper which realizes superior ride comfort. The characteristics and performance of two types of active vibration damper are described; one is actively controlled roller guide and another is the actively controlled electromagnetic damper installed between car frame and the platform.

A new measuring system was developed for elevator installation and renewal to automatize guide rail measuring. In this system, the guide rail bending and displacement are measured by using optical distance sensors without using the plumb line. These sensors are arranged along the guide rail by straight bars attached on the top of cage, and measuring distance data while cage is moving through the elevator shaft. The distance data are analyzed to estimate the guide rail bending and displacement. Through experiments using a prototype system, it was verified that the accuracy of measurement is 0.05 mm.

Inclination section high-speed escalator has been proposed. The escalator step speed in the inclination section is faster than that in the landing section, resulting in a safer landing section and shorter arrival time. Thus far there have been few reports on the practical development of an inclination section high-speed escalator. This paper describes a basic study of the inclination section high-speed escalator. First, the basic mechanism for accelerating the escalator steps with a new link system is described. Next, we discuss the making of a kinematics simulation model of the escalator and the development of the link mechanism simulator. The simulator is used to optimize the making of the link mechanism. Finally, the miniature (one-fifth size) model of the inclination section high-speed escalator that we manufactured is shown. The experimental results prove that the inclination section high-speed escalator is technologically viable.

When the passenger goes up and down a skyscraper by elevator, over 600 m speed per minute, he feels unpleasant by rapid atmospheric pressure variation. Sometimes he may feel a ache of tympanic membrance even. In order to soften it, a system which controls the atmospheric pressure inside the elevator car is proposed. To investigate how to control atmospheric pressure variation, we provided the atmospheric-pressurecontrol-chamber equipment. Using the chamber we did monitor experiments. This paper reports the results.

The demand for lifts and escalators in buildings is going to be extremely high in Middle East Asia especially in countries with a high population, such as India and forward planning Countries like the UAE, Qatar, Srilanka and oil rich Saudi Arabia, Baku etc. This can lead to the shifting of manufacturing production lines from the highly developed countries to Middle East Asia, or export to these countries as the laws are supporting. (The lift and escalator manufacturing industry is very labour intensive, it is logistically suitable to use the huge and economical labour supply in Asia). The rapid growth of business in these areas is predictable, in the Indian sub continent including the UAE (which with its proximity to India and with presence of large Indian companies and Indian work force is an extended arm of Indian subcontinent.

The Lift Directive has provided the opportunity to manufacturers to carry out self-certification under the restriction that they have a certified quality system (Module H). In this paper experiences will be presented. These experiences are based on the first inspection of new elevators which are obliged in Netherland. Distinction will be made between the manufacturers using module H and those who don’t. Causes for non-compliance will be elaborated. This will be translated in conclusions and suggestions for improvement.

The Housing & Development Board of Singapore (HDB) started the Lift Telemonitoring System (TMS) in 1984 to monitor lifts in the high-rise public housing estates. To date, more than 16,000 lifts are monitored by the system. TMS uses SCADA technology to monitor real-time status of the lifts, such as breakdown and passenger trapped. From a centralised Master Station. The lift maintenance companies are automatically notified of any problem and in most cases repairs are carried out even before a complaint is received. The introduction of TMS has resulted in better lift performance as historical data allowed HDB to pinpoint problem areas and improve the method of maintenance. Besides detecting problems with the lifts, TMS can also be used to carry out remote testing of lifts and other emergency standby equipment.

This paper intent to be a summary of the state of the art signal processing techniques applied to vibration problems diagnosis in elevator worm gears. An analysis of worm gear designs and of the possible and more common defects originated in the design itself, the machining and mounting process and wear induced defects is presented as an introduction. Vibration patterns for the introduced defects are presented and finally the applicability of advanced signal processing techniques are considered for the detection and diagnosis of this kind of mechanical defects. Frequency domain techniques such as cepstrum and enveloping, time – frequency techniques such as wavelets and global and statistical indicators such as Kurtosis, TSA, NA4, FM4 and others are considered for the particularities of worm gears analysis. Conclusions about low cost software applications for the implementation of these advanced algorithms are finally presented.

This paper constitutes a review of the most recent analysis and measurement tools developed initially in line with the needs of the aerospace or automotive sector, which once released to the general engineering community, could be used in the lift sector for the analysis of noise and vibration problems. New digital sensors with embedded calibration data (TEDS), micro electromechanical transducers (MEMS), new scalable DAQ systems based on signal conditioning units connected to a lap-top as a dedicated instrument. Recent post processing algorithms for Operational Modal Analysis, Operating Deflection Shape, correlation and model updating and advanced CAE tools such as multibody simulation with flexible bodies and control, statistical energy analysis (SEA) and vibroacoustic simulation (structural/fluid – acoustic coupled analysis) are considered from the point of view of lift noise and vibration engineering.

Energy saving machine-room-less (MRL) elevator solutions are a must these days. The building owners do not want to waste space with separate rooms only containing driving systems. Conventional traction MRL elevators fulfill this requirement, but they inherently have the problem to be located in upper floors which creates dissatisfying noise. This and other disadvantages have been solved with BeriPacâ, the smart driving solution based on low volume fluid technologies. Other applications such as goods elevator are still best designed by hydraulic driving units and achieve an unequaled price performance ratio. A prerequisite thereby is again a sophisticated drive and electronically controlled hydraulic, in order to reduce energy consumption and guarantee a smooth riding comfort. A revival of on market free available hydraulic elevators is recognized due to smart hydronics provided by the leading manufacturer of hydraulic elevators.

Automatic doors are THE major source of accidents with elevators. Almost every elevator manufacturer is confronted with consequences from such incidents and very often, the case ends with tremendous compensation payments. A study showed that compensation relatingto accidents with elevator doors reached more than 300 Million US dollars alone in the United States in one year. This paper analyzes today’s safety concepts on automatic elevator doors and identifies the various risks involved with this important part of the elevator. A recently performed field study about accidents relating to elevator door problems clearly identified the holes in the safety concept. This paper gives advice on how the safety codes and standards for elevator doors should be developed and what the elevator companies can do today to reduce the risk of being sued in a product liability case.

Ride Quality of lifts is traditionally expressed in many different ways. Besides the wide variety of units and measurement methods it is overall the many different ways of interpretation of the measured values, which makes it so difficult to compare results. Globalization of elevator business and increased awareness of ride quality made harmonization necessary. ISO/TC178 has developed a standard that defines the methodology for measurement and the interpretation of ride quality data. It also focuses the view on perceived ride quality by taking into account the vibration perception of the human body. Examples in this paper will demonstrate the risks for misinterpretation in the actual situation and the new methodology will be described in detail.

In a number of large cities such as Istanbul, Kobe and San Francisco in the world seismic disturbances may be expected. The hazardous areas have been mapped and both probability and severity ratings are available for most areas. Any building in a seismic risk area should be designed to withstand the earthquake shocks. The elevators at seismic risk and their hoist ways require certain additional considerations over normal installation practices. Thus in this work it is presented that what precautions are to be taken to provide the safe operation of the lifts installed in the seismic risk zone of Istanbul.

Transporting people from a specific position to an other specific position inside the buildings such as shopping centers and underground stations is an import ant issue. Escalators and passenger conveyors, therefore, are always considered to transport passengers. Roller chains are used as pulling and driving members of escalators or passenger conveyors. From this point of view, it is significant to research the forces acting on the chain and analyze the stresses and the deformations of the chain links during the operation. In the study, the mechanical behaviors of a standard roller chain which is loaded by the maximum allowed load are considered and the analyze of the chain link is performed by the boundary element method using BEASY(r) software package.

Car frame calculations on particularly large-car freight elevators are made with the assumption that both sides of the safety gear work equally and synchronously. However, in these types of cars having a wide distance between rails or having four rails, equal and synchronous transmission of the motion from the governor rope to both sides of the safety gears may not be possible. Generally, the side of the safety gear nearest to the governor rope holds first. On high capacity cars, such an operation of the safety gear can result in deformations on the cars. In this paper, a comparison is given between a normal calculation on a freight elevator and a calculation made according to the single-side operation of a safety gear. Calculations of car frame are made in both cases, the difference between them is revealed and a calculation method is recommended.

To be stuck in an elevator cabin due to power failure is an unpleasant and unfortunate experience, which may lead to very serious consequences. This issue is even more important for people with disabilities, and in recognition of this, “interlift 2003” organized special forum on “European Year of People with Disabilities”. Recent occurrences in North America, Canada and London have shown that power failures are extremely difficult and almost impossible to avoid even using the most sophisticated technology. Technology, however, can be used to avoid or minimize the unwanted consequences. With the advances in power electronics, both in technology and high volume production numbers, it is now reasonable to have a battery powered evacuation device with an affordable cost. In practice, a preferable evacuation device should operate with any kind of main elevator panel with many different specs, existing in the field, and should fulfill the requirements of NEN-EN 81-1.

When mounting the elevator guide rails, they are considered as beams fixed on one side and the mounting processes are carried out on one side as considered in the calculation. In this case, upward and downward movements of the rails and rail brackets are not taken into account. However, when the calculations of horizontal movements of the brackets are not taken into account, faulty manufactures can be made. Brackets prevent the horizontal movements caused by Fx and Fy horizontal forces produced during braking. Since the standard recommends no calculation in this subject, the brackets made of materials thinner than required can be used. The paper gives the calculations of the forces that can be produced on the brackets and explains that these calculations should be included in the standard.

A number of different conventional methods and techniques have been used to assess the energy consumed in lifts. These vary from basic rules of thumb to look up tables and basic calculators. These are driven by different needs and motivations, such as design improvements, sizing of components and/or environmental concerns. This paper will give a general overview of all of those methods and the applications within which they have been applied. It will review an example of each method in detail to highlight its features. It will then outline their advantages and disadvantages compared to modern simulation and modeling techniques.

The energy consumption of elevators is normally only a small fraction of a building‘s load. However, it is becoming increasingly important for the elevator industry to be able to answer questions about energy consumption accurately. A new approach to energy modeling has been commissioned and developed on behalf of ThyssenKrupp Elevator. The new elevator energy model can be used to calculate the energy consumption of any individual trip for both hydraulic and electric elevators. The energy model is linked to the Elevate (TM) lift traffic simulation program. This allows us to calculate the energy consumption of an elevator installation in any building, and for any passenger traffic demand.

The main concern in using elevators as a primary means of egress during an ICE (Imminent Catospheric Event) revolves around the perception of the Elevator systems total reliability. This paper will demonstrate that if the concept of evacuation elevators is based upon a reliability proven and robust design platform there will be an accepted method of using elevators for egressing a building during an ICE scenario. The reliable emergency elevator design platform has four complex component sub-system platforms which need to be proved, tested and integrated not only in there specifically sub-system assembly but also into the complete emergency evacuation elevator design platform system, these subsystem platforms are:

This paper will report on research work carried out by Arup in providing the following:

a) Providing a generic failure modes, effects and critically analysis.

b) Defined operational availability based upon the level of service emergency evacuation elevators demand.

Based upon these two concepts a reliability maintenance activity can be defined. The paper will discuss the concepts of mission failure, basic failure, mission profiles and risk assessments, which are fundamental for evacuation elevators. This paper will show that it is therefore, essential that in the next generation of evacuation elevators will be mandatory and that reliability proven design platforms will be required to ensure that mission failure will not occur during an ICE.

Elevator systems suffer from vibrations caused by various sources of excitation. Hoist and compensating ropes, due to their flexibility, are particularly affected. They represent axially moving continua with time-varying length. A parameter defined as the ratio of the transport velocity and the product of the fundamental frequency and the corresponding maximum length of the ropes can be used as a measure of the rate of this change. If this parameter is sufficiently small the rate may be considered as slow for typical lift installations. Consequently, lift systems has slowly varying natural frequencies. The dynamic behavior of ropes in traction lift systems is discussed and the critical speed at which divergence instability occurs is determined.

We introduce a novel group elevator scheduler based on an explicit decision theoretic calculation for the expectation of any polynomial function of passengers‘ waiting times, marginalized over sources of uncertainty in the system state. The same framework can be used to identify risky assignments that have low expected costs but may cause some individuals to be “stranded“ with excessive waits for service. The resulting scheduler avoids risky assignments while minimizing average passenger waits. Experimental results demonstrate that the method can reduce the fraction of passengers waiting more than 60 seconds by more than 50 %, and achieve lower waiting times than reference ETA schedulers.

Since their first introduction in the New York Subway Terminal Building in 1934, the biggest drawbacks to the more favorable use of local, double deck passenger elevator group applications has been 1) the necessity to identify whether the elevator rider’s destination is an odd or even floor and the requirement to then board the appropriate deck and 2) untimely “other deck loading” stops and messages that occur when only one deck stops in response to a car or hall call and there is no coincidental stop registered for the other, co-joined deck. Now that up-peak booster options and hall call destination encoding dispatch methodologies are being routinely applied to single deck passenger elevator groups, a logical extension would be to harness this advanced technology for double deck local passenger elevator group dispatching, as well.

Otis Elevator Company developed a revolutionary elevator to meet the demanding requirements of the emerging “machine-roomless hoistway“. The fundamental uniqueness of the Gen2 elevator system is based on coated steel belts (CSB) technology instead of traditional steel ropes. The elevator code requires that the sheave diameter must be at least 40 times larger than the diameter of steel ropes to prevent their failure due to bending fatigue. Application of thin (3 mm thick) belts with steel cords and application of the 40:1 bending formulaled to significant reduction of machine driven sheave size. The machine torque and speed (rpm) are directly related to sheave diameter. The smaller sheave yields smaller torque and higher speed requirements. The size of an electric motor is proportional to required torque whereas the efficiency of energy conversion increases with speed. These two rules worked favorably for development of very compact, highly efficient elevator machines utilizing Coated Steel Belts (CSB). This paper presents details about size, footprint and efficiency tradeoff between elevator machines working with steel ropes and CSB.

This paper describes a modeling and analysis methodology that can be used to optimize elevator design to achieve stringent vibration specifications using analytical models to understand, evaluate, and optimize key elevator vibration sources and dynamic response modes. A key element in this methodology is the dynamic car model of the elevator cab, frame, and substructure that is created by extracting a reduced-order linear model from a developed finite element model. A parametric nonlinear model of the elevator guidance system is integrated with this car model allowing time history predictions of the elevator lateral vibration levels to be made. Key factors are identified based on design of experiments techniques which are then used to propagate probability density functions for key output variables using Monte Carlo simulation methods. The resultant analysis is used to drive key design choices and component requirements to robustly meet elevator vibration design requirements.

ETD, Estimated Time to Destination, is a patented ThyssenKrupp Elevator algorithm which can be used in three modes: (i) destination dispatch, (ii) conventional dispatching with up/down hall call buttons, (iii) a combination of destination input on busy floors, with conventional hall call buttons on other floors. Improvements have been made to the ETD optimization function so that it can adjust the relative importance of waiting and transit times. Other optimisation parameters can be introduced, such as a function to minimise the energy consumptionarising from alternative dispatching decisions. ETD is also being adapted to the Vmax controlled over speed technology, and to TWIN, which utilizes two cars in one shaft.

It is apparent that elevator systems are becoming more and more complex and buildings require safe reliable elevator systems not only during normal occupation but in cases of emergency evacuation. However are the route maintenance technicians sufficiently skilled and trained.