I think the routing algorithms could be interesting. It's funny to think about the possibility of gridlocked elevators.
ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
101–110 of 208 posts
Re: ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
#102Aside, for those interested in the music behind the video, it's an original composition, and you can learn more and download it here: http://www.urban-hub.com/de/people/der-videoproduzent-der-mu...
Re: ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
#103The big benefit is that you get more than one elevator per shaft. For skyscrapers the amount of floor space wasted by elevators grows exponentially by the number of floors. Say you have a 5 story building that needs a one shaft elevator. 5 floors tiles 100 sqft per floor is 500 sqft of wasted shaft space. Then say you have a 10 story building that needs two shafts. Now you are wasting 10 floors times two shafts or 2,…
The space isn't wasted if it's used to transport people, though.
Re: ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
#104Schedulers for Multi must be fun - I'm sure they must have employed a whole research group for solving this problem. Scheduling simple elavator systems is still a problem nowadays, this one? It's so much harder.
Sounds like it'd be a fun game
Re: ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
#105This will be how we build towers twice as tall as existing megatowers. As beautifully explained by xkcd[0], "If your building has lots of floors, you need lots of different elevators, since there would be so many people trying to come and go the same time. If you make a building too tall, the whole thing gets taken up by elevators and there's no space for regular rooms." But if one elevator shaft can have multiple in…
The car motion is not independent and it's hard to use the capacity well. Consider the morning rush in a big office tower when everyone starts on the ground floor. You can only use the bottom car to move these people. You need a sideways dimension of movement to avoid this problem.
Oh, definitely, I agree. You need at least 2 (probably 3 or 4 for extra redundancy) shafts. But you need them to be usually one-way shafts. So everyone going up gets in at the same door, and the empty cars can fly down the other side to be ready to take more people up.
Re: ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
#106what problem does this solve to justify the crazy expense, complexity and maintenance? the reason elevators exist is because people cannot easily climb 100+ vertical ft, especially while carrying stuff. on the other hand, humans are well adapted for horizontal travel - 15mi per day without breaking a sweat. and when they're not, there are movable walkways like in airports. this whole thing is a solution looking for a…
I think this solves a number of problems. Foremost the horizontal movement between buildings. China has a lot of these towers and typically there's skyways to walk across. An elevator that moves horizontally could make it easier to move from 1st of one building to 30th of another. Another point made in the video is that the elevators can move around one another. Solving the issue we have now of a single shaft moving one car to multiple, busy destinations (i.e. the morning rush) allowing multiple cars to use the same shaft to work around one another. All in all I think this is aiming to solve the two greatest problems: time, and cost.
Re: ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
#107Schedulers for Multi must be fun - I'm sure they must have employed a whole research group for solving this problem. Scheduling simple elavator systems is still a problem nowadays, this one? It's so much harder.
I'm rather sure they haven't.
Source: Myself, working in a high-rise building served by ~20 ThyssenKrupp elevators, 10 of which actually share 5 shafts (they're not the ropeless version though, AFAIK), and the scheduling sucks big time. We got them to informally acknowledge that they're being wiped every night to get around some nasty bugs, so they never learn traffic patterns, but even then it's infuriating to see how crap they are even on a Sunday with the building empty.
Re: ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
#108The elevator industry has been playing around with multi-cab systems for many years. The Otis Odyssey system (1997) [1] had cabs that could move both horizontally and vertically. The cabs were more like containers carried vertically in ordinary elevators and slid out sideways for horizontal movement. Otis built a full-sized prototype, but nobody ever ordered one.
Otis considered ropeless elevators, but in 1997 it looked like it would increase the energy consumption by 7X. Without counterweights, the motors have to do a lot more work. But maybe Multi can recover some of the energy via regeneration.
There are automated parking garages that can move cars sideways.[2] Those go back to the 1960s, and tend to be high-maintenance.
The Multi system looks really complicated mechanically. All those moving parts. Worse, they're on vertical surfaces in the shafts, where maintenance will be difficult. With regular elevators, the high-maintenance items are in the machine room. This will probably go into some prestige tower, but not be replicated much.
[1] http://www.barkermohandas.com/images/Integrated%20Vertical%2...
Re: ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
#109The big benefit is that you get more than one elevator per shaft. For skyscrapers the amount of floor space wasted by elevators grows exponentially by the number of floors. Say you have a 5 story building that needs a one shaft elevator. 5 floors tiles 100 sqft per floor is 500 sqft of wasted shaft space. Then say you have a 10 story building that needs two shafts. Now you are wasting 10 floors times two shafts or 2,…
The space isn't wasted if it's used to transport people, though.
In an n floor building, nobody is being transported in n-1 floors.
Re: ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
#110Am I the only one who noticed that the first elevator shown in the video, while the narrator discussed the birth of the elevator in 1854, is gear-based and hence rope-free?!
That's Otis's original safety elevator, and it was a rope system. The innovation was that it had a mechanism to stop it if the rope broke.