Name: An Elevator That Actually Goes Sideways
Uploaded: 2020-04-01T01:05:03.000Z
Duration: 4 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In June 2015, I went to Sheffield, and I saw a paternoster lift,

an obsolete design of elevator with a looping chain of open cabs.

In June 2016, I travelled to Genoa in Italy,

and I saw an elevator that also moved sideways.

that moves inside a bigger elevator that does the heavy lifting.

And I'm in Germany, at the brand-new Thyssenkrupp Elevator Test Tower,

and they have flown me out here to show off Multi:

their actual, full-size, working elevator

For us, it was very important to have a tower to test the new technology.

We don't want to test it at the customers' site.

The tower is 246m high, and this means 1,700 steps.

I know that exactly, because I walked up once!

This is a building made almost entirely of elevator shafts.

but some of them are reserved for this new system.

The principle of having a continuous rotating flow of cars

was one of the best inventions in our industry ever.

And to achieve this, we have to exchange cabins from one shaft to another.

And to have this exchange, we need an exchanger,

And this exchanger allows us to go into horizontal movement.

The exchanger can be placed at every point in the shaft

so it allows us to do all kinds of configurations.

Coming down vertically, and then going into the horizontal movement.

One of the problems with elevators in really tall buildings

is that you need a cable so long that it can't support its own weight,

let alone the weight of the cab that's then connected to it.

The solution here is a bit different, and it doesn't use cables at all.

Linear drive - it's also a synchronous motor with permanent magnets.

And you maybe know it from a rotating motor.

If we just take this motor and cut it on one side

And this is what we have, vertical and also horizontal.

In a regular elevator, it's called a traction elevator,

any one of which can hold more than the design weight.

Also, you've got emergency brakes which will pop out

and slow the car down with friction if it's moving too fast.

And, absolute worst case, even if all that somehow fails,

you have a buffer at the bottom that should reduce a freefall drop

from "fatal" to just "severe injuries"(!)

Elevators are incredibly safe because they're incredibly well-regulated.

So before this is allowed to carry humans,

this system needs to be at least as failsafe.

The safety is not just in the ropes of a conventional elevator

In conventional elevators, you have the brake

on the machine on top of the shaft in the machine room

now we have the brake directly on the cars.

where we go from vertical into horizontal movement,

also needs to be checked by our safety controller.

And in case of any violation of a safety rule,

Linear induction motors are expensive and heavy.

Each one of the cabs needs to have its own set.

And the whole elevator shaft, from top to bottom,

needs to be lined with the magnetic coil units that power them.

To save weight, these cabs are made of carbon fibre and aluminium.

but everything's been tested and approved here,

To the kind of enormous multinational companies who build skyscrapers

And that might be a greater challenge than making the elevators in the first place.

Thank you very much to all the team at Thyssenkrupp who've invited me over here.

You can pull down the description for more about Multi.