Maglev Elevators by 2008?

An anonymous reader writes "CNN is reporting that the first magnetic levitation elevators could hit the market as soon as 2008. The Toshiba Elevator and Building Systems Corporation has stated that the same technology used to develop high speed trains will soon be available in their elevators. From the article: 'The maglev elevators will be quieter and more comfortable and will travel 300 meters (984 feet) per minute -- not as fast as the company's conventional lifts that can move up to 1,010 meters (3,314 feet) a minute, Toshiba said.'"

Comments

Oh wowee

[Concern]

So, it's:

1. Slower
   
2. More complex
   
3. Dangerous failure mode
   
4. Uses lots of electricity
   
5. Difficult to maintain (no elevator technicians know maglev)
   
6. Dare I speculate... more expensive?
   

But at least I get the thing I've always really wanted in a new elevator:

More "comfortable."

Wow, this baby's got legs.

Re:Oh wowee

[T3hFish]

Yes... but it is the latest tech! Since when did people start demanding that new products are better than older versions of the same product?

Re:Oh wowee

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but it's cool, which is why every company that wants to have the most high-tech building will want it. :)

Actually, it is most certainly all the things you describe, but remember, this is the first generation of these things. As time goes on, the cost will go down, and efficiancy will increase. My guess is that the designers are looking ahead to the super-skyscrapers they see coming down the road, and they want an elevator that is fast and easy to maintain. True, maglev isn't either of those things, yet, but they obviously want to see if it can be further refined.

And another good thing about this is that any maglev research is good for other projects, such as trains. SoI say that this could turn out to be a good thing.

Re:Oh wowee

[MikeFM]

The only thing on your list that really seems to be correct is slower and I'd imagine that is only in these early models. A maglev has the potential to move people much faster and be much simpler in design so probably easier to maintain, safer, and cheaper. It shouldn't use as much electricity as a normal elevator since friction should be reduced. It's all magnetics which means there is little in the way of parts to break and no need for counter-weights, pullies, etc. If the power dies I'd expect the car would just freeze in place or possibly slowly lower to the bottom floor.

Re:Oh wowee

[DurendalMac]

7. Wipes the drive on your iPod/laptop/thumbdrive whenever you move up a floor.

Re:Oh wowee

[EvanED]

Dangerous failure mode

Probably not. It is probably based on a toned down version of the ride you see at some amusement parks (e.g. the Pit Fall at Kennywood in Pittsburgh). In the Pit Fall, most breaking is done by large permanent magnets that surround metal fins. As the car falls, the magnets induce a current in the fins that oppose the motion.

With the magnets already needed for propulsion, it wouldn't be difficult to add something similar to the elevators.

(Also, there's not enough detail in the article, but there's no reason that you couldn't use almost all the safety features used in traditional elevators in a maglev one.)

Re:Oh wowee

[Mt._Honkey]

3. Dangerous failure mode

I presume that you mean a power failure resulting in the elevator freefalling for 110 floors. This is easy to avoid in a system such as this where on the car they probably have magnets placed near conducting plates along the elevator shaft. If power were to fail and the car start falling, the magnets would induce eddy currents in the conductors, which would create an opposing magnetic field, slowing the motion of the car.

This has been used routinely with great success at amusement parks in those drop-towers where you are lifted several stories in the air, then dropped freely most of the way down only to be stopped in the last few meters. There is no active breaking system to stop you: if you look closely you can see metal plates sticking out of the tower that pass behind the car, where magnets are positioned to pass very close to the plates (I'm talking specifically about the one in Six Flags Great America).

You can play with this yourself by dropping a strong magnet down a vertical copper pipe. It will move very slowly, even if it is only barely touching the sides.

I'm not saying that the elevator is a good idea, just that it is probably safe.

Re:Oh wowee

[HaMMeReD3]

Reasons I think your wrong

1. Fast for a first generation, the speed can be increased with more power, and further increased by turning the shaft into a vacuum, eliminating air resistance.
2. Simple, instead of pullies and leavers and motors, your left with a system with no moving parts. Nothing will ever wear out, except the permanent magnets in a long long time
3. Failure can be handled like todays elevators, clamp to the walls and put the breaks on
4. Read above post, about how it has no moving parts, so I dont think maintenence aside from software patches would ever be necessary.
5. More expensive, yes this one will be, but considering that the overall maintence will be less, and it will mostly be run by cheap computers, a power relay, and a bunch of magnets, it'll be as expensive as the building is tall.

This will lead to a new generation, elevator shafts that do not require their own floor on the building, elevators that are capable to travel as many floors as we can build from a single shaft. Improvements such turning the elevator shaft into a vacuum would allow the elevators to travel at insanely fast speeds. Sure the first one will be expensive, but in 20 years, every new elevator will be a maglev one.

Re:Oh wowee

[manthrax3]

I see the main advantage being elevators that can do more than simply go up and down.

Re:Oh wowee

[AddressException]

In the Pit Fall, most breaking is done by large permanent magnets...

Remind me never to go on that ride! ;)

Re:Oh wowee

[Daxster]

The EMP wouldn't be nearly strong enough to do that. It wouldn't be advisable to be running such a unit nearby, but I've stuck magnets on hard drives without ill consequence (sure, they're old 256mb drives, but there was no data corruption).

Re:Oh wowee

[EvanED]

# Simple, instead of pullies and leavers and motors, your left with a system with no moving parts. Nothing will ever wear out, except the permanent magnets in a long long time
# Failure can be handled like todays elevators, clamp to the walls and put the breaks on

You're being inconsistent. The reason that brakes (Ha! I'll not make the same mistake I did in my last post!) in today's elevators work remotely well is that there's a counterweight. Lose that and probably your safety systems become crap.

So you either need something new in the maglev elevator, or a counterweight. But if you have a counterweight, you've got at least a pulley.

Now, it's possible that the induction-based brakes I and another poster described would substitute for a counterweight, in which case you could get away with no moving parts, but I'd have to see some experiments and calculations before I would trust it as a replacement.

Re:Oh wowee

[timelessroguestar]

I think the important bit is that cable length/strength won't be an issue, and that they're hoping that the speed will improve with further development. Conventional elevators didn't start at speeds of 300 meters a minute, let alone 1000. So it's not an unfair stretch that the technology will impove. Okay, I'm pulling this out of my ass, but it's a pretty safe bet.

Re:Oh wowee

[networkBoy]

A maglev excells in the taller buildings where cables become a liability. Cable elevators are just like a striped set without parity, lose one bit and you've lost it all. The friction brakes on the car are the parity and those would be there in the maglev version as well.
-nB

Re:Oh wowee

[EvanED]

The reason that brakes (Ha! I'll not make the same mistake I did in my last post!) in today's elevators work remotely well is that there's a counterweight. Lose that and probably your safety systems become crap.

I've thought about this a little more (I should do that before posting, but we all know the desire to get something up before someone beats you) and it might not be true. Safety systems currently are probably designed to withstand a cable break, in which case there goes the counterwight's braking power. (Yay for homophones.)

(I STILL think though the benefits of a counterweight outweigh (no pun intended) the additional cost and complexity.)

Re:Oh wowee

[rco3]

Zaphod: Yeah? What else to you do besides talk?

Lift: I go up or down.

Zaphod: Good. We're going up.

Lift: Or down.

Zaphod: Yeah, ok, up please.

Lift: Down's very nice.

Zaphod: Oh yeah?

Lift: Super.

Zaphod: Good. Now will you take us up?

Lift: May I ask you if you've considered all the possibilities that down might offer you?

Zaphod: Like what?

Lift: Well, er, there's the basement, the microfiles, the heating system... um. Nothing particularly exciting I'll admit, but they are alternative possibilities.

Zaphod: Ah, Zarquon's knees, did I ask for an existential elevator? What's the matter with the thing?

Marvin: It doesn't want to go up. I think it's afraid.

Re:Oh wowee

[EvanED]

I'm not knocking the tech or its use; I think that a maglev elevator has uses, and I'd ride in one without hesitation. (I'd even probably choose the maglev if there was a choice just to check it out.)

All I meant by saying I'd have to look at experiments and stuff was that my intuition says that a counterweight would provide quite a bit more stopping power than induction brakes, so I wouldn't just assume that there are no moving parts.

Re:Oh wowee

[Grishnakh]

This really isn't that hard.

In addition to induction-based brakes, you could have simple friction brakes. It would be sorta like brake drums on cars, except linear instead of circular; brake shoes would pop out in an emergency, applying the friction material to steel beams next to the elevator. During normal operation, the shoes would be held back using electromagnets; when the power fails, the electromagnets would deactivate, causing the brakes to activate.

This is the same way that fire doors in places like hospitals and other commercial buildings work. They're held open with electromagnets, and when the power fails, they close.

Re:Oh wowee

[Forbman]

But how would it really be any worse than a hydraulic lift that has a catastrophic failure of part of the hydraulics system? No, not the seals around the moving parts, but, say, a hydraulic pump line blows off of its fitting (like this would happen without some sort of warning at all. At the very least, hydraulic fluid stinks when it is hot. a slow leak somewhere would stink enough to probably get the elevator's users to complain to someone eventually.

It wouldn't be a free fall trip to the basement, but it could be close.

Even so, they still put on mechanical safety breaks on these just in case...

Re:Oh wowee

[demonlapin]

Okay, posting instead of moderating. Perhaps foolish.

It is trivial - really - to design an elevator system capable of withstanding a cable break. Imagine a system in which the tension on the cable is keeping a pair of arms from slotting into teeth on the sides of the elevator shaft walls. That's probably the simplest method.

If passenger elevators really would fall to the passengers' deaths if the cables broke, do you think that there would be any distinction between passenger and freight elevators? Mr. Otis was able in the late 1800s to demonstrate that his design was capable of withstanding a complete cable transection.

Not that the parent addressed this, BTW, but elevator transit speed is limited by how quickly our ears can equilibrate, not by how quickly the boxes can move. If you don't mind painfully popped ears, you can easily double the rate of travel of conventional elevators.

Re:Oh wowee

[Basehart]

"they're hoping that the speed will improve with further development"

No doubt there's a Moore's law for Maglev elevators. If there is you can expect Maglev elevators to be travelling at 10 miles per minute in just five years.

That's pretty impressive.

Re:Oh wowee

[Concern]

Thank you, this was a very interesing explanation. One of those moments when you wish you could go back and edit a post... :)

Re:Oh wowee

[Killall -9 Bash]

i don't think those would work too well if the power went out. best to have emergency measures that don't rely on a source of power.

Re:Oh wowee

[freedom_india]

Your sig is right on the nail !
For that alone you needed to be modded up +1 insightful.

Sorry man, i wasted my mod points on the Mac BBC...

Re:Oh wowee

[rtaylor]

This has 2 major advantages.

1. There should not be a height restriction. Cables on elevators have a tendency to swing around at resonance points. This limits the length of the cable and the height of the shaft as a result.

2. It should be possible to run more than one elevator in a single shaft. Have a single up-shaft and a single down-shaft, then at the floor the elevator could move to the side. Many buildings have a large portion of their floor plates used by elevator shafts serving other points in the building. You can do things like express elevators to other lobbies but otherwise this limits the practical height of the building.

We know how to build a building that is several thousand meters in height. Aside from construction costs, transporting people to those upper floors has been the large difficulty. This might solve the transportation problem.

Re:Oh wowee

[DurendalMac]

I know that. Hard drives have surprising powerful magnets in them. It's called an exaggeration for the sake of humor.

Re:Oh wowee

[LoRdTAW]

Sealing the shaft for a vacuum would defeat the maintenece free part. Every door would have to have a seal which would definatly be high maintenence. Perhaps a blower or fan of some sort to help relieve the piston effect.

Re:Oh wowee

[1u3hr]

Slower
More complex
Dangerous failure mode
Uses lots of electricity
Difficult to maintain (no elevator technicians know maglev)
Dare I speculate... more expensive?

Several have modded this "insightful", which isn't your fault.
Why do you assume "dangerous failure mode"? More than a cable elevator anyway? Is there a chance on earth that safety wasn't a MAJOR consideration in the design?

Why assume "more complex"? More advanced does not mean more complex -- I'd expect that it would have substantially fewer moving parts (and thus fewer breakage, fatigue failures).

Why "uses lots of electricity"? Is a cable pulled elevator somehow the paragon of efficiency?

"No elevator technicians know maglev" -- it'll be maintained by the company that installs it, like every elevator. It's not like window cleaning when you can hire someone who sticks their card in your mailbox.

Re:Oh wowee

[yobjob]

A maglev excells in the taller buildings where cables become a liability.

Try telling that to Betty Lou Oliver. In 1945 a plane crashed into the Empire State Building, causing an elevator cable to be sheared. The elevator holding Oliver fell 75 floors and she survived. Why? Because the cable below the elevator formed a coil at the bottom of the shaft which cushioned the landing.

Re:Oh wowee

[znode]

You left out the best part!

Zaphod: "Afraid? Of what? Heights? An elevator that's afraid of heights?"

Elevator: "No, of the future..."

Zaphod: "The future? What does the wretched thing want, a pension scheme?"

Re:Oh wowee

[networkBoy]

IIRC the friction locks are kinetic not electric, thus your non-powered safety requirement.
-nB

Re:Oh wowee

[cHiphead]

I could see this as the future of multi-directional transport.

Re:Oh wowee

[Sledgy]

Of course how much faster can you go? If you go too fast suddenly you start getting very heavy/light (depending on direction).

Re:Oh wowee

[complete loony]

Since I assume (haven't RTFA) there's no cable, a later version could possibly move horizontally as well. Yay, turbo lifts.

Re:Oh wowee

[Anonymous Coward]

7. Wipes the drive on your iPod/laptop/thumbdrive whenever you move up a floor.

8. RIAA approved.

Re:Oh wowee

[MikeFM]

True although I think it isn't very noticable if the transition is gradual rather than jerking. I'd think a maglev would offer much smoother transitions than a normal elevator as it's much easier to make smooth changes to electrical charges than to mechanical devices.

Re:Oh wowee

[katsiris]

Remember that the weight or 'g's you feel (or don't) is a result of acceleration, not velocity. Which is lucky for all those astronauts going to Mars by 2020.

Re:Oh wowee

[ColaMan]

Well, when they build these, they can put a big spring down there. Happy?

I reckon the guide rails could taper in a bit when you reached the bottom of the shaft - say, over the last 20ft. Your falling car could then wedge itself in and stop slower than just hitting the deck. You could survive decelerating from 100mph in 20ft, although you'd be pretty pissed off about it.

Probably end up just crushing the car like a coke can though :-/

Re:Oh wowee

[dxprog]

Sideways, frontways, slantways, backways and all the other ways you can think of.

Re:Oh wowee

[amliebsch]

It shouldn't use as much electricity as a normal elevator since friction should be reduced. It's all magnetics which means there is little in the way of parts to break and no need for counter-weights,

Do I read this right? There is no counterweight? That would make it VASTLY more inefficient. Elevator cabs are typically counterweighted with a weight equal to the cab plus an average-sized load. So at the peak of the distribution curves, with a normal elevator, the only force to overcome is friction, plus or minus a couple hundred pounds of cable, which, in a decently maintained system with functional bearings, is not very much. So now you replace that with an elevator that has to overcome less friction, but now 100% of gravity - for the passenger plus the cab? I wouldn't be surprised if that was literally orders of magnitude less efficient.

Re:Oh wowee

[Velox_SwiftFox]

They used to run electric trains over the Sierra Nevada using the method. The descending trains served as generators to power the ascending ones.

Re:Oh wowee

[jcr]

Dangerous failure mode

Why wouldn't it have gravity brakes like any other elevator?

-jcr

Re:Oh wowee

[jcr]

The reason that brakes (Ha! I'll not make the same mistake I did in my last post!) in today's elevators work remotely well is that there's a counterweight.

What's your next guess?

To pass safety certification, an elevator's gravity brakes have to work if the main hoist cable fails. IE, no connection to the counterweight.

-jcr

Re:Oh wowee

[amliebsch]

If power were to fail and the car start falling, the magnets would induce eddy currents in the conductors, which would create an opposing magnetic field, slowing the motion of the car.

Wouldn't this also induce considerable resistance to motion when the elevator was in normal operation?

Re:Oh wowee

[amliebsch]

Why "uses lots of electricity"? Is a cable pulled elevator somehow the paragon of efficiency?

Just about. A properly balanced cable-pulled system with a counterweight, on its average run, only needs to overcome friction and inertia - NOT gravity. It's about the most efficient way I can think of to make something go up and down over and over again.

Re:Oh wowee

[HaMMeReD3]

Well the vacuum is really an exageration, vacuum tubes traditionally just using gravity, tend to pass shit around way faster then I'd ever want to travel.

Re:Oh wowee

[pomo monster]

"If passenger elevators really would fall to the passengers' deaths if the cables broke, do you think that there would be any distinction between passenger and freight elevators?"

Wait a sec... are you saying that I'm risking my life every time I take the freight elevator instead of the (slower, more crowded) passenger elevator? Will I really plunge to the bottom of the shaft if the cable breaks from too much rough sex or whatever?

I always thought the distinction was that freight elevators are big and bare, and passenger elevators are plush and fitted with modern conveniences, like attendants. Little did I know.

Re:Oh wowee

[skyman8081]

Compared to the South African mining elevator incident(Vaal Reef?) where the elevator got stuck in the shaft and cable piled up on top of the elevator until it was too heavy to hold, at which point it fell down the shaft because of all the slack cable that had piled up. The momentum of the falling elevator sheared it off the cable, where it kept going until it hit the bottom of the shaft, reducing its remains to a wreck only 2 feet high.

Re:Oh wowee

[zeroduck]

Oh, silly man.

How Willy Wonka would beg to differ!

Re:Oh wowee

[1u3hr]

A properly balanced cable-pulled system with a counterweight, on its average run, only needs to overcome friction and inertia - NOT gravity.

So how does the counterweight balance the variable weight of passengers and freight? Anyway, comments elsewhere say the maglev sustem will have cables and counterweights, it's not a rail gun. I didn't really think it would be slowed by friction anyway, unless the energy is stored in a flywheel or counterweight it would end up as a lot of wasted energy (heat).

Re:Oh wowee

[DK_LA]

Not that the parent addressed this, BTW, but elevator transit speed is limited by how quickly our ears can equilibrate, not by how quickly the boxes can move. If you don't mind painfully popped ears, you can easily double the rate of travel of conventional elevators. How about pressurizing the elevator car, much like an airplane?

Re:Oh wowee

[hazem]

Reasons I think your wrong

      1. Fast for a first generation, the speed can be increased with more power, and further increased by turning the shaft into a vacuum, eliminating air resistance.

Heck, if you're going to make the shaft a vacuum, why not just make it a pneumatic elevator - kind of like those things at the bank drive-throughs?

Re:Oh wowee

[jcr]

Ever take the stairs to the 100th floor?

-jcr

Re:Oh wowee

[Dr. Spork]

Do you know if there are plans for multiple elevators in a shaft? The idea seems obvious (it occured to me independently, see my other post) but I wonder if there isn't some fundamental hitch. If not this would be an excellent solution and might really improve the practicality of very tall buildings.

Re:Oh wowee

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't this also induce considerable resistance to motion when the elevator was in normal operation?

Yes and no. It would induce considerable resistance to motion at different speeds than intended. When working normally, there is a moving electromagnetic field, and the elevator moves along with it.

It's the same principle as a regular electric motor. As long as there is power, it rotates at the same speed as the magnetic field rotates. If the power fails, the motor turns into a generator or alternator, creating electricity instead of using it. This can be used for braking, and is used for braking in e.g. electric locomotives.

Re:Oh wowee

[Stelminator]

The variable weight is negligible compared to the weight of the giant metal box itself. In any case, it's still more effecient to only have to move the variable weight than the variable + static weight, which is what an elevator without a counterweight would have to do.

Re:Oh wowee

[Anonymous Coward]

How about pressurizing the elevator car, much like an airplane?

The preassure is just going to change at a much faster (painfull) way when the doors open.

The problem has nothing to do with the speed of the elevator itself, but with how fast your ears can adjust between the different preassure levels at different heights.

If adjusting takes two minutes at a certain height difference, a preassured elevator could do it in halv a minute no problem - but then you would have to wait a minute and a half for the preassure inside the elevator to be lowered before opening the door. So, preassuring the elevator is basically useless as it will take the same amount of time anyway.

Unless you don't open the door, but go back down immidiately - or the top floor is preassured (could be a solution for a tourist view tower thing, where the other floors aren't accessible from the elevator).

Re:Oh wowee

[tigersha]

France does not have Maglev trains. Germany developed a protoype of one and sold it to China (which uses it on the cummuter line between Shangai airport and the city center). The German parliament is perenially discussing building a Hamburg-Berlin link but it is pretty expensive and there is now a new high-speed rail link which makes it less viable. Maglev is not THAT fast.

The French TGVs are high-speed trains but they use normal rail technology. The French Train system is powered from the normal grid which is largely nuclear. The Germans also have a high-speed train, the ICE (InterCity Express). The trains are 20 km/h slower than TGV at the fastest points but the trains are waaaay more comfortable. They still do 280km/h though. Travelling by ICE rocks.

Both systems can travel on normal tracks but both system also have special ultra-high-speed sections dedicated to them. In the case of ICE the main one lies between Frankfurt Airport and the Ruhr, which bypasses the Rhine Valley and cuts the journey time Franfkurt Airport -> Bonn from 2 hours to 45 minutes. Sadly you skip the nice scenic Rhine Gorge at the Lorelei, so its not ALL better :)

Re:Oh wowee

[Fred_A]

Great, just what we need, a railgun elevator.
Don't bother looking for me, I'll be in the stairs.

Re:Oh wowee

[Eivind]

Indeed. Any modern elevator has like three independent braking-systems. For example, the funicular in Bergen is able to stop by any of:

• Aslong as the cable is intact, the cable can be braked by a drum-brake at the top.
• If that drum-brake goes, there's a second, independent cable-brake that basically clamps around the cable.
• If both those go, the cars still don't accelerate very much, because there's a counterweigth so only the imbalance of passengers would cause acceleration.
• If that's still bad, or the cable itself is broken, then the wagons instantly clamp to the rails they travel along. This is so because the tension on the cable is working against a spring that tries to push brake-shoes up against the rails. If the tension goes away, the spring wins.
• Yeah, if *all* of that fails, you migth have a problem.

Needless to say, this never happened. Inspite of the thing being in operation for like literally a hundred years and transporting thousande of passengers daily. I imagine newer designs can be even more secure, but I don't really think it's worth the effort -- it's good enough. People plummeting to their death in elevator-accidents is not a major cause of death outside of Hollywood.

Re:Oh wowee

[dotgain]

Personally I'd rather have to clean egg off my face now and then as opposed to the abuse that editing posts could afford. You followed up and admitted you learned something, good man. What's so bad about that?

Re:Oh wowee

[Zog The Undeniable]

Otis' original safety brake used a toothed track running down the walls of the shaft on each side. The cable was attached to the lift via levers operating on a pair of dogs which were designed to engage with the toothed tracks and stop the lift. The cable tension held the dogs clear of the ratchet.

Otis demonstrated the system in public by cutting the cable (actually a more easily-cut rope, for demonstration purposes) while he was in the lift. As soon as the cable tension failed, the dogs sprang out, engaged the shaft and Otis only dropped a few inches. Of course, modern systems use different safety devices, but the original Otis one would not work with a maglev drive.

Re:Oh wowee

[somersault]

then you'd have to pressurise the whole building, unless you wanted to take time to decompress slightly after going up to the top floor.. hehe

Re:Oh wowee

[maxwell demon]

The discussion of the Hamburg-Berlin link is over. That one will not be built. AFAIK the only application in Germany which is still under discussion is the link from Munich to its airport.

Re:Oh wowee

[McTaggart]

The way I would design them (and I'm aware this wouldn't bring the elevator to a complete halt) would be that they generated power when they braked. Electromagnetic somethingorother, induction sounds like it's what I'm after. It's amazing how you forget stuff after an exam...

Re:Oh wowee

[maxwell demon]

Of course the whole dialog fits much better to yesterday's article.

Re:Oh wowee

[maxwell demon]

But AFAIK a maglev system can (mostly) regain that electricity when going down again.

Re:Oh wowee

[walt-sjc]

Yes - I for one support our MagLev overloards. I'm going to petition building management to be the first test site. It should be a wonderfully smooth ride for my backup tapes... Doh!

Re:Oh wowee

[sco08y]

This will lead to a new generation, elevator shafts that do not require their own floor on the building, elevators that are capable to travel as many floors as we can build from a single shaft.

That's probably the biggest improvement.

Look at it from a builder's point of view: your biggest constraint is the number of square feet. It's pretty much fixed by budget and regulatory concerns. If you can get a whole room back, and maybe a few square feet each floor, you're not doing too badly.

The biggest problems remain: an elevator can only accelerate and decelerate so quickly and remain comfortable. (You can't, for example, have an elevator drop faster than 9.8m/ss.) You can still only have one elevator per shaft.

Re:Oh wowee

[Harry_Ballsak]

I'm sure the thought of having a computer running this thing will spark the idea for Bill Gates to come out with Windows MagLev Edition.

Now imagine a Blue Screen of Death in the 89th floor!!!

Re:Oh wowee

[Critter]

Dual use too. Remove the roof and you have a railgun.
Perfect for launching small satellites into space, or for duck hunting.

Re:Oh wowee

[Emperor Skull]

You forgot quieter. You have obviously not had the pleasure of getting a hotel room next to the elevator. I imagine people living in high rise apartment complexes will be thrilled as well.

Now if they can figure out how to quiet the occupants then they would really have something.

Re:Oh wowee

[Retric]

Compare:

Floor 100 with 0 passangers vs bottom floor 0 with a full load 3500lb's.

Cable is not light. And you still need to expend energy overcoming momentium of the car, cable, and counter weight.

Regenerative breaking is vary effecent (90+%)and I don't think you need to expend energy holding the car in place so on average the system should be about as energy effecent excluding the cooling costs which are not that bad.

Re:Oh wowee

[accessdeniednsp]

...induce a current in the fins that oppose the motion.

Much like the US Congress.

Re:Oh wowee

[Secrity]

"Now if they can figure out how to quiet the occupants then they would really have something."

Perhaps equipping elevators with aerosol Fentanyl dispensers?

Re:Oh wowee

[kesuki]

actually, to increase the speed one doesn't create a vacume (which is vritually impossible to do anyways) one greates negative pressure in the direction the car is traveling EG you pump air above and out below for downward flow, and vice verse for upflow. instead of needing to create a fancy air tight shaft, etc all one needs is some reversible computer controlled fans of sufficient suction.

creating a perfect vacume tube with airlocks every floor etc would be an enginnering nightmare, and waaaay more expensive than a pair of high flow fans.

and the fans eliminate wind restiance far more effectively too, since the air flow can actually Create lift in the direction you wanted the elevator to travel, rather than trying to be at 0% drag one can acheive -1000% drag (or 1000% more lift than ordinary wind resistance alone could acomplish) (the actualy number depends on the size and power of the fans, but you get the idea)

you also missed the point other posters made, the faster the elevator is 'freefalling' the more breaking power the maglev elevator has to stop itself with (assuming it's using the drive engine to generate power, assuming it relies on the built in permanent magnets then it will slow down more gradually, but will come to a slow even if the electromagents themselves failed). and unlike the 'jarring' sudden stop of a total failure system that conventional cable elevators have, the maglev breaks could cause a nice gradual ride down, all the way to the bottom of the shaft where the doors can be opened manually. instead of being 'trapped' in ana elevator needing rescue by fire firghters you're just suck waiting to reach the first floor at a mind numbingly slow pace (for saftey reasons) a substantial improvement over existing elevator tech.

Re:Oh wowee

[slashname3]

The technology for implementing an idea from another thread! How cool!

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174209&cid=144 92988

Once you get rid of the cables then elevators can move side to side as well. By creating a set of shafts that allow elevators to move up/down as well as sideways additional cars can be added or removed as the traffic requires. During peak loads several dozen cars can be in motion at once. During off hours one or two cars on standby are all that is needed.

Combine this with the other recent article about scheduling cars based on the floors people want to go to and you can provide fast service by adding a new car as soon as someone hits the button if one is not moments away from that floor.

This could be the real world implementation of the turbo shaft on Star Trek.

Should probably file a patent for the idea.

Re:Oh wowee

[ivan256]

# More complex
# Dangerous failure mode
# Uses lots of electricity
# Difficult to maintain (no elevator technicians know maglev)

Irrational fear of technology before you understand it....

Here's your luddite card. Go stand with the people who don't understand why there's no big deal having fuel cells on airplanes.

Re:Oh wowee

[SteeldrivingJon]

Don't these people watch Mythbusters?

(The falling elevator episode gave my Dad the willies - he worked in elevator service & service management at Otis for 45 years)

Re:Oh wowee

[theJML]

It's a good plan, but every single floor would have to be individually pressurized to match the bottom floor and the elevator.

That being said, there are certian locations where they've done such a thing. Last time I was at The Sears Tower in Chicago (probably 8 years ago now) I went up to the observation deck on like the 106th floor. There is an express elevator for all the tourists that starts in the basement and goes directly to the 106th in under 45 seconds. Thing is FAST, ears pop once on the way up, but the reason they don't pop twice is because the entire basement is about the same pressure as the 106th. I'm sure it's a pain to keep it that way though, and as I said, you're ears still pop once, so the system isn't perfect but we had to go through double doors that try to keep the pressure consistant and all that fun stuff. It's wierd to go into a basement and have your ears pop...

Re:Oh wowee

[Tekzel]

Well how about a modern maglev equivilent. How about a system where the power that generates the maglev effect also holds BACK the tensioned dogs. As soon as power is removed due to failure, they are released and engage the teeth, thereby stopping the lift. A deadman switch in effect.

Another idea I was thinking as I read this, regenerative breaking of a sorts. The falling elevator could conceivably be used to turn a generator which would generate power which could maybe be used as an alternative way of doing something :) How about that for vague?

Re:Oh wowee

[Doctor Memory]

So that's why they always put bars on the top floor of tall buildings!

Re:Oh wowee

[somersault]

I thought that was to save you from having to take the lift to go for a drink

Re:Oh wowee

[Hast]

You could even extend the idea of having elevators that move sideways. Eg at a hotel you could replace the hallways with the elevator "shaft" and have the elevator go directly to your room.

Perhaps not the best idea, but I'm sure a lot of neat applications could be made if the elevator carts were less contrained.

Re:Oh wowee

[Hast]

After travelling around in Japan for a while with Shinkansen I really wish the Eu would make themselves useful and try to establish a Eu system for high speed trains. If I could jump on a train in Sweden and go all the way down to Germany/France directly that would be *so* much nicer than going by the small and cramped airplanes.

I wouldn't have to bother with all the crap associated with airtravel neither. (Though it's pretty decent compared to what I hear about the US. We're not all treated as terrorists.)

Re:Oh wowee

[raynet]

Yup, elevators today can be amazingly fast. About 10 years ago I worked at Finnish elevator company Kone and their building had an elevator so fast that when it went up your knees bent and going down gave you a nasty falling feeling in your stomache. I think at max speed it went a floor in a second or so. I guess they don't install that fast elevators in normal buildings as it isn't very confortable to use.

Re:Oh wowee

[SethJohnson]

the Pit Fall at Kennywood in Pittsburgh

Wow. I love Kennywood. Thanks for the reference.

This is likely the system to be deployed. Even so, there are other safety mechanisms that could be implemented. For instance, there could be hinged rubber stoppers that contain some kind of steel ball inside of them. As long as the maglev is functioning, the stoppers are retracted by the magnetism operating the elevator. Once the magnetism ceases, gravity pulls the stoppers down to make contact with the track and stop the downward motion of the elevator.

Seth

Re:Oh wowee

[smbarbour]

I'll respond to points 1 and 3 (Which I will speculate as the most important points).

1) It is only slower when going up. When it is going down, it has the potential to accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2! :)
3) Catastrophic failure (resulting in casualties and/or fatalities) can be prevented using a magnetic braking system which provides a force proportional to the speed of the vehicle. Add a physical stop at the lobby level and in the event of a failure, the vehicle will return to the ground floor with it's occupants unharmed. That sounds better than being stuck between floors for who knows how long.

Re:Oh wowee

[dTox]

1. Use a falling elevator to turn a generator which would generate power 2. ??? 3. Profit!!!

Re:Oh wowee

[poot_rootbeer]

We know how to build a building that is several thousand meters in height. Aside from construction costs, transporting people to those upper floors has been the large difficulty.

That, and the fact that terrorists like trying to knock them over with trucks and airplanes.

Super-skyscrapers may be possible, but they're not really practical, and not just because getting to the top of one requires transferring to a different elevator car at least once.

Re:Oh wowee

[Thud457]

Then they'd add AI to the controller computers and they'd all go sulk in the basement.

Re:Oh wowee

[nairnr]

Not entirely accurate. While the cable did contribute to some degree, the fact that the shaft was a high pressure design with very limited clearance slowed it down more.

From The Official Empire State Building Website:

" Also, the hatchway was of a 'high-pressure' design, with minimum clearance around the car. In such a small space, the air was compressed under the falling elevator. With such a tight fit of the car in the hatchway, the trapped air created an air cushion in the lower portion of the shaft -- thereby further slowing the elevator car and allowing its occupant to survive."

Re:Oh wowee

[kilodelta]

Not to mention it won't necessarily have to travel vertically but could do horizontal as well.

Re:Oh wowee

[WreathOfBarbs]

*sigh* Ain't that the truth! Travel here sucks, and the reality of it is we are no safer than we were before 9/11.

Re:Oh wowee

[smoker2]

We know how to build a building that is several thousand meters in height. Aside from construction costs, transporting people to those upper floors has been the large difficulty.

I don't believe getting people up is as much of a problem as getting them out in an emergency. You have plenty of time available to "load" the building as the people aren't all trying to get in at one time, but getting them out when they all want out simultaneously is a hard task.

When they tried to evacuate the Petronas tower just after 9/11, it took around 40 minutes.

Maybe they should invent a system where each potential evacuee is given a strong magnetic belt to wear, and then told to jump down a pipe to the ground, the braking being done by induction.

Re:Oh wowee

[rtaylor]

That, and the fact that terrorists like trying to knock them over with trucks and airplanes.
I didn't say Americans would build them.

Developers in other countries that don't have that particular fear will do it. Dubai and Hong Kong are probably both ready to step up to the plate -- they're both pushing elevator systems as far as they can go today.

Re:Oh wowee

[AJWM]

You can still only have one elevator per shaft.

Well, yes and no. Only one per section of shaft, perhaps, but it's fairly common in very tall buildings to have some of the vertical shaft space partitioned into two or three "local" elevator shafts, with a couple of "express" shafts interconnecting the building sections. I've also seen elevator systems that use a double-decker elevator car, allowing loading/unloading on two adjacent floors at once (typically for the express elevators - use the stairs if you're only going up or down the one floor).

Without cables to get in the way, and with some way to transfer cars from one shaft to another at the top and bottom (and possibly points in between in very tall buildings), you could have dedicated 'up' and 'down' shafts with multiple maglev cars in each.

Re:Oh wowee

[AJWM]

Cool. Take the roof off the shaft and we could make orbit.

Oh, wait, that's seven miles a second. Okay, give it ten years. And some heat shielding.

Re:Oh wowee

[merlin_jim]

Are you reading, America?

280 km/h!!!!

Somewhere around 150 mph???

Yeah. I'd love to drive a couple hours to a major metropolitan city, take a train down to Florida, and have my dad pick me up at the station.

I'd go to Florida 2-3 times a year if that were the case; assuming of course that train tickets would cost substantially less than plane tickets...

Re:Oh wowee

[MikeFM]

Instead of a counter-weight you counter gravity with magnetics. The at rest position of the magnets should equal the weight of the car. Not to hard and less moving parts and less space needed.

Re:Oh wowee

[Scott Byer]

This will lead to a new generation, elevator shafts that do not require their own floor on the building...

Don't underestimate the value of this, especially in the residential/LULA market, where any extra depth required or any extra area needed between the car and shaft itself is critical.

It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Re:Oh wowee

[WaterBreath]

If both those go, the cars still don't accelerate very much, because there's a counterweigth so only the imbalance of passengers would cause acceleration.

This doesn't sound right to me. I'm pretty sure gravity accelerates any amount of mass at an equal rate: 9.8m/s^2. Shouldn't matter whether it's 50kg or 1500kg.

Re:Oh wowee

[AvitarX]

In America, with great highways ubiquitous cars and cheap airfair it would never work.

America is huge, and ruinning trains and maintaning tracks smooth enough for these high speeds is very expensive.

And when I last went to Florida I probably averaged close to half that speed, I could of course have chosen to go around half again to double that speed for not too much money (comperable to train) and not have cost the tax payers much money at all. (average speed by plane includes one hour check in and one and a half hours driving).

Of course if Amtrak did not have to maintane the cross country lines (it's not the 1800's anymore afterall) where is subsidises a ride more than plane tickets would cost (meaning it would cost less for Amtrak to give away plane tickets, then let people pay for the train) we could probably afford to subsidize the tracks more.

Re:Oh wowee

[merlin_jim]

Yeah I say get rid of cross country lines; all the lines should be about the same as the tax-payer subsidized commuter flights.

I used to pay $80 to take a flight from Greensboro, NC to Pittsburgh, PA once a week! The plane was never full, either. No way they were making money on that flight...

Get rid of commuter flights. Give me mid-range high speed train lines any day of the week! From my local airport, we offer commuter flights to Charlotte (18 minutes airborne time!!!), NYC, Washington DC, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh. If they just provided express service from Charlotte to those cities I'd be happier... if they threw in Orlando or Miami I'd be ecstatic.

Hell while I'm making a wish list, New Orleans, Detroit, and St Louis wouldn't be bad either.

It takes me $230 round trip to drive to Fort Myers, FL to visit my family. I'd be willing to pay a little MORE than that to ride a train - both to reduce wear and tear on my car, the reduced transit time, and of course the increase in productive use of my time (i.e. gaming/coding/studying/writing/sleeping instead of driving)

Re:Oh wowee

[eno2001]

Ah but young padwan... you forget... What was it that got Windows to sell? Was it their lower cost during the Win 3.1 days? Was it their fugly Program Manager/File Manager paradigm in Windows 3.1? What's that you say? Windows 3.1 didn't sell well at all compared to Mac OS? Well, allow me to explain:

1. Windows didn't sell like hot cakse until they did two things. The first is that they raised their price thereby instantly making them better in perception than Mac OS. The thinking behind this? "If people are willing to shell out a lot of money for Mac OS, they will be just as willing to shell out MORE money for Windows 95".
2. They then mimicked all of the good things about Mac OS in Win95. They did it poorly, but they did it. And they added more garish color which equates to "comfortable" for the clueless among us.
3. They also made sure to jump from 16-bit to mostly 32-bit in order to make the OS run slower on existing PCs of the day. So that works out in their favor too because people then know that to have a really good experience they need to dump that old box and get new stuff because PCs get slower as they get older due to some undiscovered law of physics.
4. Those newer PCs are less efficient than the older ones and therefore use more power.
5. Windows 9x was considerably more complex than DOS/Win 3.1 in a technical sense and therefore more prone to failure.
6. For those techs who were diehard DOS/Windows fans, Win95 was not a happy move. They couldn't deal and therefore left the business so they could manage their BBSs in peace.

So there you have it. Windows exhibited ever aspect that you consider a flaw in these mag lev elevators. And it is a huge success. Undisputed. Now... I'll tell you where you went wrong there young 'un. You didn't realize that the one fatal flaw of maglev elevators is that they use magnetism to operate. This means that you'd better have all your magstripe cards in a shielded wallet if you want to be able to use them. Of course, I contend that Toshiba is fully aware of the fact that mag stripes are going the way of the dodo and it won't matter anymore that mag lev elevators give off huge magnetic fields. And when the brain tumor lawsuits come, they won't know what hit them. Whaddaya think of them apples!?

Re:Oh wowee

[buck_wild]

The parent (to you) poster explained that there was a counterweight, likely approximately the same weight as the elevator car, perhaps taking the cable weight into account. So if the car were empty it would go neight up nor down.

Add in the weight of passengers and then the elevator will go down and your formula applies.

Re:Oh wowee

[buck_wild]

Sorry. 'neight' should be read as neither.

Re:Oh wowee

[buck_wild]

Nice! I've worked in buildings with 75+ floors, and I would have loved to ride one of those!

Perhaps this would be accepted more easilly if there were seats. At least along the side, for the sick, weak or elderly. At best, there could be two rows of eight seats with an aisle down the middle for entering or exiting.

Re:Oh wowee

[buck_wild]

Some posters above had recomended that the elevator shaft itself be a vacuum. This has been somewhat discredited for many reasons, among which were "The shaft is simply too big."

Something the size and shape of an elevator car, however, should prove to be easy to seal and provide a perfect environment for a vacuum. If the speed is increased in future iterations, people won't have to hold their breath for nearly as long.

My own personal favorite method for a quiet elevator ride is to expell some gas at begining of the ride. That or lock eyes with them, smiling goofilly. After a few moments, claim "I've got cheese in my pocket."

Re:Oh wowee

[i41Overlord]

Instead of a counter-weight you counter gravity with magnetics. The at rest position of the magnets should equal the weight of the car. Not to hard and less moving parts and less space needed.

You can't do that with electomagnets. At rest, ( no motion and no electricity flowing through the wire), you don't have a magnet at all, you just have a coil of wire.

That only works with permanent magnets, and to make a maglev you need to be able to switch the magnets, hence requiring electromagnets.

Re:Oh wowee

[i41Overlord]

If passenger elevators really would fall to the passengers' deaths if the cables broke, do you think that there would be any distinction between passenger and freight elevators?

The difference between passenger and freight elevators has absolutely nothing to do with that. Both of them have the same type of safety systems. The passenger elevators are just designed more for comfort, while freight elevators are more basic.

Re:Oh wowee

[MikeFM]

Which is why you'd use a combination of the two. ;) Would seem the obvious solution.

Re:Oh wowee

[i41Overlord]

You're missing the obvious. Even with a mixture of both, it doesn't do you one bit of good.

You need both magnets to be permanent magnets for there to be repulsion at rest. However, if you used that setup in a maglev, they'd resist its movement during normal operation. That's the problem with permanent magnets- you can't switch them. Therefore to get usable motion, you need at least 1 electromagnet that you can switch.

You can have both sides being electromagnets, or you can have one side a permanent magnet and the other side an electromagnet. In both cases, when the power goes out, it's not going to hold its position.

Re:Oh wowee

[demonlapin]

I stand corrected. However, the point still applies for many construction "elevators" - flat platforms that run in a shaft with only a cable for support. That was more what I was thinking of.

Nice to know, though.

Re:Oh wowee

[ender_]

Actually the biggest _typical_ difference between passenger elevators and freight elevators has to do with the doors.

Most freight elevators have doors that part vertically. This allows for a bigger opening since the doors can go up and down the shaft a lot farther than they can into the walls in a horizontally parting passenger elevator. That way you can get big cargo or drive whole fork lifts into the elevator.

The safety features as far as falling down the shaft are identical.

There are other differences in the operation of the elevator sometimes, namely the way the buttons operate the car, but they are not significant.

Re:Oh wowee

[WaterBreath]

Add in the weight of passengers and then the elevator will go down and your formula applies. I understand all that about tension forces on either side of the pulley netting out and resulting in zero net downward force on the connected masses. My point was that, regardless of how much effective weight there was, it should not affect the acceleration. I did have it wrong though. I forgot that non-zero net force that results from putting people in (adding mass on one side) has to act over the mass of the people, and the elevator, and the counterweight. Which means that acceleration will be lower than normal. The gravitational force on the people is all that's available to make motion, but it has to pull more than just the people. So acceleration will be less.

Re:Oh wowee

[The Other Davey]

"As soon as the cable tension failed, the dogs sprang out, engaged the shaft and Otis only dropped a few inches. Of course, modern systems use different safety devices, but the original Otis one would not work with a maglev drive."

No, but a similar system would. An electro magnet holds the dogs away from the rail, and when the power fails a spring pushes the them against the teeth.

Not that I see anything wrong with the current system...

Re:Oh wowee

[gfreeman]

3. Dangerous failure mode

If you are worried about the power going out, then line the shaft with spring-mounted bolts that are kept in by electromagnets. When the power goes out, the springs push the bolts out and the elevator cannot move.

Re:Oh wowee

[scotch]

My bad, I though you were poo-pooing the technology. I get what you mean about having to figure out the principles for yourself.

Re:Oh wowee

[Eivind]

This doesn't sound right to me. I'm pretty sure gravity accelerates any amount of mass at an equal rate: 9.8m/s^2. Shouldn't matter whether it's 50kg or 1500kg.

Sure. But in this case the mass causing acceleration (i.e. the inbalance) is much smaller than the mass accelerating. The thing is actually large, passenger-capacity is like 100 people in each wagon, and the counterweigth is actually a second wagon that goes up when the first goes down.

So if the total system (2 wagons, 2km cable, 150 passengers) end up weighing 70.000 kg (I actually think that's a fair guess), but the passengers are split 100 in one wagon and only 50 in the other, then there's an imbalance of around 3750kg. Since this is only around 5% of the mass to be accelerated, you end up with an acceleration of only 5% of 9.8m/s**2, or around 0.5 m/s**2 which is very moderate.

Hope this is more than.

[bstadil]

one-upman ship

Re:Hope this is more than.

[umofomia]

Of course it's more than oneupmanship. You should be able to fit at least 10 men in there. :)

Re:Hope this is more than.

[slughead]

Hope this is more than one-upman ship

Yeah, the smooth ride helps to prevent throw-upmanship.

A big So What...

[greginnj]

I read TFA, and as GP writes, it's slower than current designs. But... "more comfortable". When's the last time you took an elevator ride and said, "damn, this is really uncomfortable!" How is the comfort issue better solved by maglev than by installing benches or heaters or AC or whatever in the current elevators?

What problem is this new design solving? Or is it just the Tamagochi of commercial architecture -- cuteness is its only market differentiator?

Re:A big So What...

[Grishnakh]

Personally, I'm always annoyed by how slow elevators are. They take way too long to open and close the doors, and they travel much too slowly between floors. What's the point if you're going to take that long? You could just take the stairs instead.

I want elevators that subject the occupants to several g's of force when accelerating and braking, and which whip the doors open in a few milliseconds.

Re:A big So What...

[sco08y]

I want elevators that subject the occupants to several g's of force when accelerating and braking, and which whip the doors open in a few milliseconds.

I think the trebuchet / bungie cord system is the way to go.

Re:In Japan, of course...

[LordPhantom]

Right. That's why asia: * Has been to the moon... * Was the first to create the internet.... * Won world war II against all comers... * Spends the most on research out of any group in the world Of course they do: * Build better cars (thanks cheap labor and stupid US unions) * Have gold farmers (this is a JOKE, not a troll ;) ) In all reality even if you can make the claim that "Asia" has the best tech now they certainly haven't always had it, and I doubt they "always" will. I'm done feeding the troll now.

Fast elevators

[Anonymous Coward]

The fastest elevator in the world, made by Toshiba, is located in Taiwan at 'Taipei 101' (you get to the 89th floor in ~32 seconds). It has a pressurized cabin and aerodynamic spoilers on it. I've been on it a couple times and it is actually quite comfortable and smooth. They have a cool scale model of it at the observation level. Worth a visit if you're anywhere near the area.

--SONET (who lost his password years ago)

Re:Fast elevators

[Anonymous Coward]

It's customary these days to give a spoiler warning if you are going to reveal spoilers like that, these days.

Re:Fast elevators

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been in that elevator last year, around the september period. The speed is amazing. You do have to buy a (relatively) pricy ticket to use it and go up to the observation lounge though. It's worth the view and the ride. I think going up was quicker than going down. The elevators also have a nice display, specifying speed, number of floors and seconds travelled.

Re:Fast elevators

[nsushkin]

Just came back from Taipei 101 about 10 minutes ago. The elevator goes up at 1010 m/m, down at 600 m/m. The cabin is air pressured, like in an airplane, so there is very little ear pop. It's eerie to get to the 89th floor in around 30 seconds. And yes, it's made by Toshiba.

The trip to the enclosed observation deck is about 350 Taiwan dollars, around $12. If you're lucky, you may be able to go for a couple of elevator trips on one ticket.

Re:Fast elevators

[Andrewkov]

And why don't you're ears pop when the door opens? Or is the entire building pressurized?

Re:Fast elevators

[Rich0]

My guess is that they slowly depressurize the cabin at a steady time-based rate as you ascend. If you don't have pressurization you depressurize at a height-based rate instead.

Since vertical velocity isn't constant, you'd normally have a period at the start and end of the run which was comfortable, with a painful cruise period in the middle. With a pressurized cabin they can let the air out slowly during the cruise period, and get caught up while the elevator is finished decellerating at the end of the trip to a smooth stop.

That's just a guess though - I'm no elevator expert...

The Giant Spring will do just fine...

[FatSean]

Don't you worry. You might throw up, but you will survive!

The downside this didn't mention?

[AWhiteFlame]

It will confuse the hell out of your pacemaker.

Re:The downside this didn't mention?

[slughead]

It will confuse the hell out of your pacemaker.

Judging by the girth of some /.'ers, this could be a huge concern.

Re:The downside this didn't mention?

[Sr. Pato]

I was actually thinking that. Wouldn't it mess with a bunch of electronics when you're riding it?

Obligatory monorail song....

[Chineseyes]

I know its not maglev but hey.... Kyle Lanley: Well, sir, there's nothing on earth Like a genuine, Bona fide, Electrified, Six-car Monorail! What'd I say? Ned Flanders: Monorail! Lyle Lanley: What's it called? Patty+Selma: Monorail! Lyle Lanley: That's right! Monorail! [crowd chants `Monorail' softly and rhythmically] Miss Hoover: I hear those things are awfully loud... Lyle Lanley: It glides as softly as a cloud. Apu: Is there a chance the track could bend? Lyle Lanley: Not on your life, my Hindu friend. Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs? Lyle Lanley: You'll be given cushy jobs. Abe: Were you sent here by the devil? Lyle Lanley: No, good sir, I'm on the level. Wiggum: The ring came off my pudding can. Lyle Lanley: Take my pen knife, my good man. I swear it's Springfield's only choice... Throw up your hands and raise your voice! All: Monorail! Lyle Lanley: What's it called? All: Monorail! Lyle Lanley: Once again... All: Monorail! Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken... Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken! All: Monorail! Monorail! Monorail! [big finish] Monorail! Homer: Mono... D'oh!

Re:In Japan, of course...

[pomo monster]

Asia? Well, sure, if you exclude everything but Japan and South Korea. And regarding the former, this Economist article once again seems relevant: "Better than people: Why the Japanese want their robots to act more like humans." It's one (intelligent) journalist's take on why Japan seems so open to new technology while Western culture is more ready to view it with suspicion.

Re:safety?

[zippthorne]

Do you seriously think the cable is all that separates you from sliding down a the elevator shaft o' doom?

Magnetic elevators?

[fleaboy]

Useful for fixing pesky storage devices? Are strong magentic fields generated by this kind of elevator?

Re:Magnetic elevators?

[barawn]

Too bad Faraday cages block electric fields, not magnetic fields.

Magnetic shielding is done using highly permeable metals - "mumetal", an alloy of copper, chromium, nickel, and iron, is the standard material used.

It'd be nice if magnetic fields were blocked by a simple Faraday cage. Mumetal's expensive.

Great Glass Elevator

[femto]

Now I know where Roald Dahl got the idea for the Great Glass Elevator from. Does anyone else find the similarity between a mag-lev elevator and a rail gun just slightly disturbing?

Re:Great Glass Elevator

[rlp]

femto wrote: Does anyone else find the similarity between a mag-lev elevator and a rail gun just slightly disturbing?

So how many points of damage does a mag-lev elevator do?

Re:Great Glass Elevator

[BrynM]

Does anyone else find the similarity between a mag-lev elevator and a rail gun just slightly disturbing?

Disturbing? Yeah, that elevator would be a bitch to aim... and you'd need a spare skyscraper next to you for ammo. Finally, SimTower becomes a FPS game!

Re:Great Glass Elevator

[addaon]

The maglev linear induction motors are much more similar to a coil gun than a rail gun. In particular, there's no current running through the elevator car itself; it's not part of an electrical circuit, but rather exposed to externally-generated magnetic fields.

Re:Great Glass Elevator

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't press the top button: ...98, 99, 100, LEO

Re:Great Glass Elevator

[Big Nothing]

"So how many points of damage does a mag-lev elevator do?"

A failing one? Your life + 1.

Re:Great Glass Elevator

[famebait]

So how many points of damage does a mag-lev elevator do?

Who cares? Just think of the jumps you could do!

Re:Great Glass Elevator

[slashname3]

This is just a ploy to build weapons that can be used to defend our cities from the space aliens. (And you thought all those years practicing at Space Invaders was for fun only.) The high scores in those games were collected and the players have been tracked. As soon as sufficient number of mag lev elevators have been installed you will be called to duty to protect mankind from the real space invaders. Your weapon of choice will be mag lev cannons conviently located in the taller buildings of your city. As the aliens approach the planet you will need to wait until the optimum moment to fire your mag lev car err weapon at them to distroy them as they advance.

With hundreds of these deployed in each city we should be able to easily defeat the invaders.

Unless they land in a rural area.....DAMN you alien scum!

Re:Great Glass Elevator

[smithmc]

  So how many points of damage does a mag-lev elevator do?

Depending on what floor you punch for, the elevator says things like "Excellent", or "Humiliation", in a deep echoey voice...

Re:Great Glass Elevator

[theblackhawk007]

Best be careful ----- if you get motion sickness or if your pregnant It is not recommended to play this game.

Re:Great.... just great.

[cdrudge]

The article is a little short on information. My guess is that there still would be a cable/counterweight involved, only using the magleve for the propulsion to raise and lower the elevator instead of a motor pulling or slowing the cable. If that is the case, there is no more or less danger involved in the new system then before.

Re:Great.... just great.

[MikeFM]

I'd imagine the counterweight is replaced by magnets that give the car roughly an upward lift that matches the cars weight and possibly it's suggested load weight too. If I were going to design a maglev elevator I'd give it a tendacy to rise up when the power stops so that the car would tend towards rising and gravity would repulse that force. Rather than using the soft magnetic pull of the electro magnets to raise the car I'd use them to help it move down by counteracting the pull of the more fixed electro magnets. So if the power went out the car wouldn't tend to fall but rather it'd hover in place or slowly sink to the basement. I'd imagine they still have some sort of emergency braking system too.

You guys are too full of fear

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why everyone's so afraid of being in one of these when the power goes out. If I were designing it, obviously I'd put in some mechanical brakes that are only kept retracted by the application of power. A power loss would fail to hold back the brakes, allowing them to pop out to their default no-power position of immobilizing the elevator.

Seems so obvious...what, are all the infantile Digg posters coming over here now?

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[ari_j]

Yeah, unless the mechanical brakes go unused for so long that they fail to deploy. I like the magnetic induction idea someone else mentioned better.

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[Buelldozer]

Are you kidding me? All the infantile digg posters CAME from here!

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[HermanAB]

...which is exactly how standard elevators work.

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[highwaytohell]

I agree.
And considering in most countries there are standards that companies have to adhere to when installing elevators, i find it highly unlikely that when the power fails, we will all plummet to our bloody doom.

In Australia a lift is required to have a certain amount of brakes in case of emergency as standard.

I suspect that if these are to be commissioned in other countries, the install will have to adhere to each countries individual building code standards.

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[HairyCanary]

Except that the failsafe mechanical brake system is in use today on standard elevators and works quite well (I've even got some personal experience with that, too!). I'd rather have something tried & true than a fancy new magnetic induction doohicky. And besides, the way you get around something failing from non-usage: maintainance.

And on the whole maglev idea itself... it seems like a solution in need of a problem. Are elevators today uncomfortable, really? The ones where I work are hardly top-end models, but they're quite smooth, fairly quick, and reliable. Certainly not uncomfortable.

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[EvanED]

I'd rather have something tried & true than a fancy new magnetic induction doohicky

Not bashing your overall point, but induction brakes ARE in common use in amusement parks and should be essentially failsafe.

However, they, on their own, are mostly insufficient. It's probably possible to make them good enough that if you fall to the bottom of the shaft with only the induction brake working, you'll be going slow enough that you'll not be killed, but the brakes won't STOP the car, so you'd need mechanical brakes too.

That said, having both induction brakes and mechanical brakes is a good idea. Redundant safety is always a good thing. I think keeping the same level as conventional elevators would be a good goal. So if you drop the counterweight in conventional elevators, adding induction brakes would be a good idea.

Of course, this whole discussion is pretty much moot (how can "moot" have two meanings that are pretty much the complete opposite?), as you'd probably have to try pretty hard to design a maglev elevator that didn't give you induction braking for free. (Okay, actually it isn't; make the car's magnets electromagnets. But that'd give two very significant downsides for no real benefit I can think of.)

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[arodland]

Of course, in an overall emergency situation, there may actually be merits to going gently towards the bottom of the building instead of being trapped at some random height above the ground.

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[vidarh]

So create an override of sorts to the mechanical failsafe (like _manually_ having to force the brakes to retract and lock them in place). That way you have the best of both, and don't end up slowly sliding into a fire etc. with no way of stopping the car.

You could even design mechanical failsafes that will only completely stop the car at the first floor it passes: Just make the brakes spring into a track in the wall and push against the sides of the track strongly enough to be guaranteed to maintain a low speed, then just have blocks for each floor so a car can never pass a floor with the mechanical failsafe brakes on. Combined with a way of mechanically retracting the failsafe brakes sufficiently to continue, you'd then have a way of getting down in a controlled manner.

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[Goaway]

You seriously never noticed before now that the one thing Slashdotters fear more than anything is new technology?

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[CmdrGravy]

I suspect the magnets normally hold the door open rather than closed.

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[Captain_Chaos]

I don't know why everyone's so afraid of being in one of these when the power goes out. If I were designing it, obviously I'd put in some mechanical brakes that are only kept retracted by the application of power.

We're afraid that you're not going to be the one designing it!

Re:You guys are too full of fear

[FurryFeet]

Second. First are women.

I hope you all like folk music

[r00b]

Great, now when my Bending Unit 22 gets in the elevator, its inhibition unit will malfunction and it will be singing "She'll be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" all the way up!

Re:I hope you all like folk music

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang, that was really funny! How did you come up with that all by yourself? (inside joke, don't think too hard)

Re:Not safe for implantees

[CaptSnuffy]

I believe the Mythbusters disproved this; their findings showed that a magstripe card would have to be subjected to extremely strong magnetic fields to be damaged.

The elevator might be a different story though.

Re:safety?

[Peyna]

Why would a maglev elevator be prohibited from having the standard safety braking systems that cable elevators have? Despite what Hollywood might have you believe, breaking the cable supporting an elevator will not bring you crashing to Earth. Worst case, you might fall a few feet before being safely stopped.

magnets?

[LootenPlunder]

so what happens to my pens around a magnet strong enough to lift 2 tons of elevator cargo? will it push up my belt buckle and give me one nasty melvin? my building has a hydraulic lift elevator, its slow but i dont have to worry about this stuff.

Re:magnets?

[mforbes]

Thank goodness that didn't say what I thought it did at first glance.

What I thought I saw was "So what happens to my penis around a magnet strong enough to lift 2 tons of elevator cargo?"

I dunno, but I predict if that idea gets out, we'll start getting a totally new brand of penis enlargment spam in our inboxes.

Re:In Japan, of course...

[Vellmont]

Of course they do: * Build better cars (thanks cheap labor and stupid US unions)

Gee, and I thought it was due to short sighted American companies. It's strange that American cars have gotten progressively better over the last 15 years or so, despite those "stupid US unions".

Re:Not safe for implantees

[DeathFromSomewhere]

No. Wallets erasing credit cards is a myth. It takes an insanely intense magnetic field to erase credit cards. When you go on a modern roller coaster that uses magnetic brakes are you asked to leave your credit cards behind?

Your Imagination Limits Your Reality

[Doomedsnowball]

Sometimes I think /. readers have little imagination. Magnetic applications in everyday life are entirely different from the maglev application. From field restricted mag-pulses, to rails to reduce friction and noise (I know that would make me more comfortable), it is and always has been possible to upgrade a horribly old technology. Pully anyone? So instead of lamenting about reinventing the wheel, you should try and discover if your imagination can accurately describe *HOW* the maglev will be implemented.

Good work

[r00b]

step 1. Watch Star Trek step 2. ???? step 3. Profit

Re:Good work

[globaljustin]

hey, is $$$$ supposed to be Adam Smith's black box, or what?

Story was corrected

[ecryder]

Earlier today, the words "per minute" read "per second." I wonder how long it took to correct? 3,314 fps would be INSANE. They could save that kind of juice for the space elevator.

Re:Story was corrected

[ecryder]

actually the text read: and will travel 300 984 feet per second -- not as fast as the company's conventional lifts that move 3,314 feet a second, Toshiba said. ...

Re:Story was corrected

[TubeSteak]

3,314 fpm = ~55fps

If you're bowhunting, that is fast enough to kill medium sized game

(learned that watching Myth Busters & their episode about paper cross bows)

Re:Story was corrected

[slughead]

3,314 fps would be INSANE.

Yeah, especially considering my monitor only does 125Hz.

Re:Story was corrected

[Eivind]

If you're bowhunting, that is fast enough to kill medium sized game

In practice, no. In the real world, a bolt fired horisontally (or nearly so) at 16m/s or so falls to the ground after like 3 meter. Good luck getting that close to "medium sized game" and then perfectly hitting its weakest spot.

Yes, sure, if you hold a crossbow firing a bolt at that speed directly up to the neck of some animal and then fire, the bolt will penetrate, probably atleast 5cm, quite possibly more.

Re:Story was corrected

[nappingcracker]

How insane? Average M-16 round muzzle velocity: 2,800 feet (853 meters) per second Slow tank round: 950 m/sec Faster tank round: 1,400 m/sec An elevator that moved faster than a bullet (a fast bullet at that), and comparable to a tank slug would indeed be insane. As long as it accelerated slowly, it would be fine, but you would run out of building before reaching maximum speed!

Mag-lev technology has its ups and downs

[ian_mackereth]

The body of this post has been left deliberately blank

Re:In Japan, of course...

[Fei_Id]

Progressively better maybe in an absolute sense... But relatively speaking; compare them to Toyota or Honda and its like comparing little league to the major leagues in baseball. Toyota specifically, is so far ahead of GM and Ford that its positively scary. Much of it comes from the unions. But more of it comes with a better business model across the entire spectrum; from assembly plants to R&D. For instance, it takes Toyota a sizable fraction of the time compared to GM or Ford(about 1/3 to 1/2 the time) of taking a car from the drawing board to full scale production; while still being either THE most or of the top 2 in reliability in it's respective class. For diehards, I specifically leave out Chrysler; since they are now DaimlerChrysler; a sizable portion of total ownership being German... not that German cars are any better than American cars in reliability(most are worse actually).

Benefits of having no cable

[Anonymous Coward]

Benefits of having no cable that I can see are:

* No limit on the height of the elevator.
Currently, elevators are limited in the number of floors they can service, because the cables
can only be so long. No such problem with these.

* Circular route using two shafts.
Elevator goes up to the top. Elevator goes across horizontally to adjacent shaft. Elevator comes down.
Result: an "up shaft" and a "down shaft". And multiple cabins could be in a single shaft at the same time.
That's a massive benefit for tall buildings.

* No "machine room" required at the top of the shaft. Nice for buildings that want to make use of their
roof space without having machine shacks on them. I've always wondered why there aren't more roof gardens
around; this removes one objection.

I wonder if they use "regenerative braking" to recover power on the descent.

Re:Benefits of having no cable

[highwaytohell]

you'll find that most new lifts being installed these days have their motors sitting on top of the actual lift As components become smaller and more powerful, lift motor rooms are fast becoming redundant. This excludes taller office towers as they obviously need massive winches etc for the amount of cable that needs to be recoiled.

Re:Benefits of having no cable

[sam0737]

Machine-room less? OTIS has made it for sometime already, the Gen2 Elevator [otis.com]

Re:Benefits of having no cable

[CubicleView]

I believe the height of an elevator shaft is also limited by the fact that a conventional one essentially weakens a building. I guess with this tech people with start enginering the elevator shafts to be stronger and longer.

Re:Benefits of having no cable

[earthbound kid]

You can't put two elevators into the same shaft, because you never know when some idiot on the third floor is going to keep holding the door open to talk to his girlfriend. Meanwhile, the person on the 42nd floor wants to go down, but the other elevator is stuck waiting on the second under Mr. Talksalot on 3.

Re:Benefits of having no cable

[drhamad]

Yeah, Montgomery/KONE deploy's large amounts of machineroom-less elevators these days - and has been for some time. All the other companies (such as Otis) now are as well.

The interesting thing about MagLev will be what happens to the service industry for elevators. Typically elevator/escalator companies bid below cost (or just plain end up running over budget) and therefore LOSE money on elevator construction projects, hoping to regain it by charging for service. Even if these new elevators require a decent amount of service still, it will be different - these guys have been trained for a long, long time on the relatively standard basic workings of elevators.

It'll also be interesting to see if the same old major companies (only one of which is still American - Otis, the rest of the American's having been bought by Kone, Thyssen, and uh... damn forgetting the last one or two) are able to stay on top in a transition like this. It seems like different technology, different business model.

Re:Benefits of having no cable

[wooferhound]

You must be over 45 inches tall
Keep arms inside of the ride at all times
This rided will make sudden starts and stops
Ride may exit top of building at high rates of speed

You could also use rockets like in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"

Re:Benefits of having no cable

[PantsWearer]

And this is different from the current situation how? Yes, for whatever reason an elevator could be stalled. Currently we just lose that particular shaft for a few minutes. Assuming that this stall isn't because of a failure, you'd just end up waiting in the shaft instead of waiting in a lobby somewhere.

In fact, if we allow elevators to move more freely, say being able to switch shafts at multiple floors, you wouldn't even have that problem. If a car was stopped, other cars would just go around. More like a train switching yard than what we think of as elevator algorithms now.

Re:Benefits of having no cable

[slashname3]

And think of the architectural changes that will come with such technology! Imagine a building with no hallways. To get to a room you get in one of several dozen cars that move you not only up but horizontally to your room. You get out of the car and enter directly into your room. All this can be based on your rooms key that is used to summon the elevator.

Want to go to the dinning room? Just press the button for the dining room, you step into the dining room. Checking out? You step from your room into the car and out at the front desk. Going to your car? You step from your room into the elevator car and step out in the garage in the section you parked your car.

With enough cars circulating in the system you would not have to share an elevator car with anyone you did not know.

Just hope...

[wildsurf]

...the earth's magnetic poles don't flip, while you're on it.

Re:Just hope...

[musakko]

Yeah, because back at home all the stuff would fall off your fridge door..

It's "maglev" horizontally, not vertically

[Animats]

This isn't a "ropeless elevator". It's a way to make elevators quieter by using a magnetic bearing between the elevator car and the guide rails. That's a nice feature, but not revolutionary.

Here's the technical reference: "Electromagnetic Non-contact Guide System for Elevator Cars", Morishita, M., Akashi, M., Toshiba Corporation, Japan.

There have been some "ropeless elevator" proposals, including ones where linear induction motors drive the elevator cars. The most elaborate proposals involve multiple cars per shaft and switches, like a vertical railroad. This would cut down the amount of building space devoted to elevator shafts considerably. Mitsubishi did some R&D in this area back in the 1990s, but there's no working hardware yet. There's been some military R&D in this area for shipboard weapons lifts, but that's more like a conveyor system. Eventually somebody will probably build such a system, but not yet.

Incidentally, the limit on elevator speed is human tolerance for changes in air pressure. 8 meters per second (downward) appears to be the comfort limit. The Sears Tower elevators were originally set for 9 m/s, and a broken eardrum was reported.

Re:It's "maglev" horizontally, not vertically

[Anonymous Coward]

What you want is the 'Burroughs magnetic elevator' - that's Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1918.

Re:It's "maglev" horizontally, not vertically

[klaasvakie]

Incidentally, the limit on elevator speed is human tolerance for changes in air pressure. 8 meters per second (downward) appears to be the comfort limit. The Sears Tower elevators were originally set for 9 m/s, and a broken eardrum was reported.

Humans have a much higher tolerance. In the South-African gold mines (where I occasionally have to work), people-carrying elevators (cages in mining slang) are allowed to travel at 15 m/s and ore-carrying cages can travel at 17 m/s. At 15 m/s there is no (to me at least) noticeable discomfort.

Skydivers travel downward at about 60 m/s during freefall and afaik do not have eardrum issues.

Re:It's "maglev" horizontally, not vertically

[Animats]

The problem is people with colds or allergies. Skydiving is dangerous for anyone with blocked sinuses. Serious ear damage can result. At skydiving speeds, it's more likely than not.

Anyone healthy enough to work in a mine probably isn't at risk for this. You might have to swallow once in a while to equalize the pressure. But office building workers aren't expected to be that rugged.

The skydiving people recommend Afrin.

Re:It's "maglev" horizontally, not vertically

[stud9920]

That's a nice feature, but not revolutionary.

I don't find this a nice feature at all. When I get locked in a metal box, I damn WANT to know I am moving.

Is today elevator day?

[lpangelrob]

Today must be elevator day... if we get a story about smart maglev elevators in Hawaii, should we consider that a dupe or further celebration?

It still uses cable

[raurublock]

http://release.nikkei.co.jp/detail.cfm?relID=12048 4&lindID=4 is the original press release from Toshiba Elevator, written in Japanese. They replaced only guide rails with maglev magnets for smoother feeling. You still need conventional rotating motor and cable.

Mt. Everest

[suso]

Maglev elevators are all fun and games until someone winds up 2 and a half times higher up than Mt. Everest.

Re:Great.... just great.

[darqchild]

Sounds good at first, but then if the power fails the maglev would fall upwards and crash into the top of the shaft. I think it requires some mechanical breaking system. Possibly a device that can tell when the elevator car accelerates downwards at a dangerous velocity.

Re:Great.... just great.

[EvanED]

Even assuming that there isn't a cable and counterweight in these (the article doesn't say one way or the other), I think I'd feel *safer* in a maglev based elevator if the power went out than I would in a conventional elevator if the cable failed.

I can almost gurantee that, at least if this doesn't have a counterweight, the way this works is that the elevator car has large permanent magnets that pass over metal fins in the wall. These fins could normally provide the propulsion, but in the case of electrical failure, you have a mechanism that will slow the car to a fairly slow speed that's almost completely failsafe. There are about 3 things that could go wrong:

1. The car's magnets lose their magnetism. But this would be very hard to do, take a long time, and could be detected easily.

2. The fins get distorted, and the car no longer passes freely over them. This is the most likely problem.

3. The computer that controls the current to the fins -- if that's indeed what's being used for propulsion -- malfunctions or is tampered with so that it essentially propels the car down.

That's it.

As long as the magnets pass over the fins, what will happen is that the changing magnetic field (because the car's getting closer) will induce currents in the fins. These currents produce a magnetic field that opposes the original -- and the car's motion.

It's the same braking principle used in amusement parks. You can test it by getting a small metal pipe and a magnet, and dropping the magnet through the tube. You'll see that it falls very slowly. (With a neodymium magnet that fits neatly in about a 1/4" tube, think a couple seconds to fall 10 feet.)

Now, the issue is that power goes out a lot more than elevator cables break... but a backup generator could help there.

Re:In Japan, of course...

[Vellmont]

Well, I wouldn't agree that American cars haven't caught up in terms of reliability. You're right in terms of profitability, but that's all because of management and bad companies. Blaming unions is like blaming the laws of physics. Unions will try to get whatever they can, and no one should blame them for doing that.

American car companies made money hand over fist for many years. They've since made a lot of bad decisions, like investing a lot in SUVs for instance. Gas prices go up and surprise surprise people don't want to buy SUVs anymore. They really dropped the ball in the 80s and lost a LOT of consumers because of the across the board terrible reliability. Even though American cars are pretty good now there's a lot of people that STILL think American cars are junk. Car companies holds all the cards, and have no one to blame but themselves when they fail.

Re:In Japan, of course...

[Grishnakh]

I call BS on the unions bit. The Japanese automakers could make the exact same cars with unionized labor, although they'd cost a lot more since they'd have to pay idiots $30/hour to turn bolts. The Japanese automakers are masters of industrial processes: they know how to set up factories and make them extremely efficient. They've done it in Japan and they've done it all over America. Changing an American automaker's assembly line to a new body style takes over a month, but Honda can do it over a weekend. None of this has anything to do with unionized labor. What's more, the American automakers now have lots of plants down in Mexico, where there's certainly no unions, but their cars are still shit.

The problem with the American automakers isn't the unions (though they don't help a lot). It's the people running the companies, and the engineers and designers creating crappy cars (although this is ultimately the management's fault too).

bumper sticker

[LoRdTAW]

Elevator repairmen know how to get it up.

Re:bumper sticker

[cogg]

... but sys admins can keep it up for months ...

Counterweight!?

[blaksaga]

Since I'm too lazy to RTFA, does this elevator use a counterweight? I could see magnetic lifts coupled with current technologies so that when the power does go out you wouldn't have to worry about falling to your death plus it wouldn't take much power to lift with a counterweight.

I can't see a magnetic-only lift being very efficient, safe, or worth replacing current systems.

Re:Counterweight!?

[vidarh]

See posts elsewhere about multiple elevator per shaft. IF the safety issue can be addressed well enough, cable free elevators could revolutionise urban development. Today building extremely high skyscrapers isn't seen as practical or worthwhile except in extremely high density/high land cost areas.

This is due in part to the extreme overhead of elevators once buildings get tall enough, because you keep having to add more shafts to get people to the top fast enough, and end up with crappy solutions like rigidly partitioning a shaft and have several sets of elevators combined with a few express elevators that only go to certain floors.

Combine a cable less maglev system, multiple shafts possibly with the ability to transfer elevators between shafts at specific points, and an reasonably intelligent scheduling system and you'd be able to increase the capacity of each shafts many times over.

Just halving the number of elevator shafts required per 20 floors of building added would have a tremendous impact on the economic viability of skyscrapers by freeing up huge amounts of floor space.

2 Cents

[fireheadca]

Elevators used to steal your change passively. Now this is a more active approach.

Elevators crash up more often then down.

Re:safety?

[dgatwood]

But emergency brakes have to be regularly inspected. If they jam and fail to activate, you're still in trouble. It's not the same sort of maintenance that a more traditional elevator might require, but it certainly won't be zero maintenance as some folks have suggested.

As for the suggestion that several folks made about using metal plates for braking, those work well if all you are concerned about is braking. The problem is, that's extra power that you're going to be wasting trying to fight against that extra braking on the way up. Nothing comes for free. If you make it only deploy on a power failure, again, you have a mechanical assembly that is subject to failure. The one saving grace is that you could probably find a way to use the rapid rate of descent to kick the plates out mechanically, then put more serious braking in the last couple of floors. Even still, the potential for failure seems too high for my comfort....

I'm not saying it can't be done in a relatively safe way, but I still feel a lot safer with a good, old-fashioned piston design. They may be slow, but they're particularly safe. You can only leak hydraulic fluid so fast, and even if the piston breaks loose at the top and bottom, you can only fall a short distance before it ends up wedged between the piston and the wall of the shaft.... It's hard to beat that when it comes to safety....

Re:safety?

[Frequency Domain]

Unless you're being pursued by an alien, a killer robot, or the undead. Then safety brakes are guaranteed to fail. It's written into their specs.

Re:In Japan, of course...

[Fei_Id]

I respectively disagree about SUVs.

SUVs and trucks are the ONLY segments where American companies are still competitive and/or leading in sales. The sheer profit and good things that happened from such a big SUV investment is partly responsible for their faltering in midsize and small/compact cars. Nissan's reliability issues with their fullsize trucks doesnt help Japan's quest to dominating the fullsize market either. (The QX56 was recently named the most unreliable vehicle of 2005 by Consumer Reports, while the Titan and Pathfinder Armada were not far behind). Toyota's Tundra, while not quite fullsize (to be larger in the next model revision) is still the most reliable fullsize over the average of many different reports; along with the Tacoma (as it always has been since its inception) for the mid-size market.

The gas crunch is only now a more recent development. And now, with Ford and GM, LOSING sales when they pull their "employee pricing" crap; they are now resorting to price cuts across the board. They can't sell them unless they hand out great deals (with exception for the C6 Vette and fullsize trucks/SUVs).

As for "catching up" in terms of reliability; that is a SERIOUSLY misinformed opinion. There are some reliable American cars; most of them in the Buick and Mercury brands. But as an average; their reliability ratings have only slightly increased (some progress is progress, of course). But take a look at Toyota and Honda; and their ENTIRE lines (especially Lexus and Acura) are on the most reliable lists of many different publications. Especially their best sellers; Camry and Accord.

True on the unions, but they are no longer needed anymore in modern times. Will a day come where they are needed again? Quite possibly! The trek towards socialism that the US (and the rest of the world) has made over the past 150 years may be just making them quite obsolete. But not right now. They are the reason Delphi has declared bankruptcy, they are one of the main reasons that Toyota made enough money last year to BUY GM or Ford, and its why they are making mention of GMs bankruptcy in dark corners of the stock market. Toyota, scared of a backlash against Japanese goods, has even been attempting to HELP GM out; they bought out GMs stake in Fuji-Subaru and have raised their prices (both times publicly stating WHY).

What I'm trying to say; while one person can find a reliable American car (there are more now than there were 10 years ago); if you randomly select one, you more than likely will pick wrong. I applaud the US companies for trying (not like they care of course), but they need new management up top (Bob Lutz was supposed to be GMs savior, but he has done nothing).

To be clearer on "being ahead"

[Fei_Id]

I was also inferring to technology R&D and deployment. If one does some research into Toyota's hybrid technology system; one can see HOW far ahead they are. In regular gasoline engine development, Honda and Toyota (especially Toyota with their new 2GR-FSE in the IS350 and the new 4.6L V8 available in the next-gen LS) are ahead in creating engines that make lots of power and torque with lower displacements, lighter weight engines, more efficient transmissions, less emissions, and better gas mileage. Honda and Toyota both have their hydrogen fuel-cell engines already going through thorough testing.

I know more about Toyota than I do about Honda, so I apologize for referring to primarily them. But for instance:

The new Toyota 2GR-FSE is a 3.5L V6. There are several larger displacement DOHC V6s on the market. Most, only 6-7 years ago, were in the 3 liter to 2.5 liter variety. Usually made about 180-230hp. Nissan being the first to really bring out a NEW V6; delivered their VQ35DE, which had a very linear horsepower curve (287 peak in the 350z guise), and a nice flat torque band (260 fr-lbs). Good emissions rating(at ULEV1 I think), and decent gas mileage, mid 20s gas mileage. You couldnt find this anywhere in the American V6s. V6s in the Mustang were making 190hp, bad gas mileage; while the Firebird and Camaro only 200hp; all with more displacement (3.8 liters).

The new Toyota is even better now. Standing by the new SAE ratings for horsepower they claim 306hp in their new IS350. While dynos (devices that actually test horsepower at the wheels, instead of the engine) are pointing to the engine actually making somewhere between 325-350hp. All while having an even lower emissions rating (ULEV2) and better gas mileage than the Nissan motor (in a heavier car even). The closest V6 in the American inventory is a new Ford V6, unsure of the size, (barring the supercharged offerings from GM - thats a whole new can of worms) making 240hp. And this motor is BRAND NEW. I'm thinking its going into some of the Lincolns IIRC (and hopefully the fivehundred - which is woefully underpowered in an otherwise nice car).

Hope that clears up my stance. Its not just profits; its a whole slew of other issues too.

elevators that can also go diagonal & horizont

[ad454]

Without any cables or other signifigant moving parts, a mag-lev elevator can move in 3D, in diagonal and horizontal shafts in addition to vertical shafts. In fact, without cables, a mag-lev shaft can easily pass from one building to another.

In fact with proper computer controls, several mag-lev elevators can be placed in the same shaft, and an elevator can switch from one shaft to another.

Although this won't be useful for a traditional tall skinny building, wide building complexes would benefit. Think 3D!

Re:In Japan, of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Won world war II against all comers"

Umm.. this doesn't sound like the US, who only joined WW2 when it was halfway through and when it was obvious who was going to win. The UK was the only one to stand up against all-comers - they were fighting when Russia was on Germany's side, and fighting alone at that. Incidentally, if any one country could be said to have 'won' WW2 it was probably the Russians.

In fact US technological innovation is suprisingly poor. It rarely invents anything. Maglev is a good example - it was invented by UK engineer Eric Laithwaite in the 1970s. What the US excels at is setting up companies to develop and market ideas which were usually first created in Europe. Your examples of space travel and cars are good ones - both created first in Germany.

I grant you that the US is amazingly good at self-deception. If something was 'not invented here' it doesn't exist for the US until Hollywood creates the illusion that an American was 'really first'. Perhaps that's why you think of Maglev as new technology?

More than one cabin per shaft? Architect's dream!

[Dr. Spork]

The single greatest factor limiting the height of modern skyscrapers are the elevators. If you had 200 floors of offices, you would need so many elevator shafts that there would hardly be any room left for building occupants!

Now consider the possibility that there would just be two elevator shafts - an "up" and a "down" - just like there are two parallel railroad tracks. If a floor requires a stop the elevator cabin would leave the main shaft (so as to not block the other cabins in that shaft) and comes to a halt in that floor's "station". Really, think of it as a vertical train system rather than an elevator. The train stops only by request, and only where there is a station with a turn-out track.

Such a "railroad-like" elevator system would make high-rise architecture a great deal more practical. Even if an ultra-high-rise would need four elevator shafts (two up and two down), it would still be a huge improvement over the 16 or more that are needed now, and service would surely be much better.

Also, since the down-elevator would be slowed by passing through a magnetic field, much of its potential energy could be recovered as induced electricity, which could be used to help lift other cabins. It would be sort of like a virtual counterweight. It's possible the energy efficiency of a maglev elevator could be competitive with a cable elevator.

Re:In Japan, of course...

[gfody]

I read the linked article. In summary, the japanese are incredibly racist.

what about my laptop?

[Brandon Dowell]

What if one were to bring a computer or ipod with a traditional hard disk aboard one of these elevators? Might the strong magnetic fields used to hold the elevator up in the air also be strong enough to completely wipe the drive?

as a point of reference: My friend accidentally wiped his powerbook by setting it on top of his Marshall JCM-900 guitar amp (the amp has two huge transformers (which consist of wire wrapped around a giant magnet) ). Considering how much larger the magnets in these maglevs would need to be to suspend a ton or more of metal, I would certainly be concerned for my data if i were to bring it on one of these.

With that in mind, maybe these will give us a good motivation for switching away from magnetic storage. :-P

Re:First lift with UPS

[mano_k]

Well I'd love finaly to manage being in an elevator with an atractive woman when the power fails!

The only elevator I ever was stuck in was at the university, CS building... ;-)

2008? Great. It shouldn't take long to

[Man in Spandex]

implement a voice that says "Up And ATHEM!"

Re:2008? Great. It shouldn't take long to

[wooferhound]

I want the button that says
-Up and Out-

Re:In Japan, of course...

[pomo monster]

That's rather simplistic, but yes, that's the culture there. Surprisingly misogynistic, too. (Disclaimer: I'm Japanese.)

There's nothing that appeals more...

[DrXym]

... than being elevated hundreds of feet into the air inside a steel box using unproven, fireprone technology.

Have a vacuum in the shaft???

[Viol8]

You've been reading too many sci-fi books my friend. Just a couple of minor
points you might want to consider:

- The ability to keep a large lift shaft in vacuum in the first place.
- The stresses on the building resulting from doing so.
- The complex airlocks required instead of standard lift doors.
- The problem of an air leak in the lift.
- Provision of an emergency air supply for passengers.
- Emergency evacuation procedure issues.
- Removal of heat from the lift.
- Maintenance issues (will the maintenance guys have to wear space suits??)

And probably lots of other little details I haven't even thought of. It might
sound cool when in a Philip K Dick novel but in the real world its a bloody
stupid idea.

Re:Have a vacuum in the shaft???

[Merlyn_3k]

I Am An Architect
Elevator shafts have major problems during a fire, they provide passage for smoke throughout a building, which typically causes 90% of fire-related deaths in buildings with unprotected elevators.

Methods of preventing this are
1. Seal the elevator doors (minor airlock, maintenance issues)
2. Overpressure (fire activated blowers provide fresh air to shaft)
3. Fire seals (fire activated doors or curtains seal shaft)

Your vacuum would just make this more of a problem.

This is an enviromental nightmare

[Viol8]

There must be 100s of thousands of lifts (maybe even millions) all over
the world. At the moment they almost all use the rope and counterweight
method which is extremely efficient as the counterweight means the motor
at most only ever has to lift the maximum load (but usually only half that)
and the lift car itself is balanced out by the couterweight so that
effectively gets lifted for free.

With maglev the system will have to lift the *entire* weight of car + load.
Imagine the amount power required to lift a 1 or 2 ton lift car up a shaft
then times that by a few thousand trips a day. The amount of electricity
required will be phenomenal!

I hope for this reason (and lots of others mentioned in other posts) that
these types of systems *never* get used.

Re:This is an enviromental nightmare

[slashname3]

This is why we must build more nuclear plants now! We will need to support all those elevators in the coming years. :)

Re:More than one cabin per shaft? Architect's drea

[cheetah_spottycat]

If it hasn't been done already ... patent the idea NOW.

cable free?

[Plunky]

Well now, I read TFA and I see no mention of cable free elevators though there is plenty of discussion here. I'm wondering though, how exactly they will translate magnetic levitation into a 100 floor tall building.. currently the Maglev trains 'levitate' very minimally (what, a couple of cm?)

I think it seems more reasonable with current technology that magnetic levitation would be used to fly the elevator away from the walls of the shaft - this gives the smoother ride that they mention but you also get the cable for up and down motion (and the counterweight for efficiency)

Am I wrong? Anybody got a better reference?

Re:cable free?

[vidarh]

There is no fundamental difference between lifting an object a millimeter or thousand meters - as long as the magnetic field is moved up together with the elevator.

The biggest issue if they are actually talking about cable free elevators would be failsafes, not propelling the elevator upwards. I'd rather not plunge to my death when the power goes :)

Re:cable free?

[Plunky]

Well thats what I want to know - how are they moving the magnetic field? Have they made some kind of linear field generator up the shaft? A series of field generators? Warp drive?

I AM A NERD AND I WANT THE DETAILS, GODDAMMIT!

oops, time for my medication..

Re:cable free?

[dmp123]

Think of your maglev train, and point it vertically instead of horizontally.

A maglev train generates a force which propels it forward over a stationery track, whereas this will generate a force which propels it upwards. Same principle.

David

Re:cable free?

[CmdrGravy]

Basically they have a big winch on top of the building which allows the magnetic field generator to move up and down the shaft, the elevator moves with the generator. Simple really.

Enter....

[vulcan25]

Half Life 2 style lifts, similar to those near the end of the game.

Lifts that don't have doors, only massive force-fields which selectively allow users in and out. When the lift is in motion you can't fall out. As soon as the lift stops, the force-field deactivates in a fraction of a second.

Re:In Japan, of course...

[dotgain]

You'd take a Honda over a Nissan, it seems. Seen a Honda post-crash?

Re:More than one cabin per shaft? Architect's drea

[grimJester]

And they could also go vertically!

Re:safety?

[dkf]

If you're going to go for a truly Worst Case, you have to consider what would happen if the falling elevator suddenly spontaneously converted into antimatter. The resulting explosion when it hit bottom would be enough to devastate the surrounding city in an (admittedly spectacular) flash of high-energy radiation.

Likely? No, but a Worst Case is a Worst Case. :-)

Re:elevators that can also go diagonal & horiz

[The_Mr_Flibble]

First of all passing between buildings brought funny things to my mind (earlier post about railguns). They get passed at the top. And running multiple cars in shafts, the control room would be like tetris. The elavator music for this would be very annoying after a short time

Nothing will ever wear out? Really?!?

[OfNoAccount]

No/fewer moving parts doesn't always mean reliable. Ever had a transformer fail? Well those maglev coils aren't entirely dissimilar beasts. Ever had a PSU fail? Pretty certain those coils will need some rather nice power supply circuitry.

All you're doing is looking at a different type of failure - electrical vs mechanical.

Re:In Japan, of course...

[putko]

Since when do Japanese care so much about anti-semites?

Based on what Jews have written, I figured Japan has many "anti-semites": http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/reviewas6.htm

No reason to have a counterweight.

[AmPz]

Do I read this right? There is no counterweight? That would make it VASTLY more inefficient.

Maglev trains consumes electricity when accelerating and regenerates electricity when breaking.
I don't see why a maglev elevator would work differently. Yes, it takes more energy when the elevator goes up, but all that energy (minus some losses due to imperfect conductors and magnets) can be regenerated when the elevator goes down.

The advantages of maglev elevators are obvious. They can be made without any critical moving parts. Conventional elevators on the other hand needs frequent cable replacemens and checkups. So, service costs for maglev elevators should be quite low compared to conventional elevators.

About safety..
Since the elevator requires zero power to go down in a normal fashion, nothing would really stop the elevator designers from making the elevator operate normally even without power. With the simple limitation of not beeing able to go up, of course. A conventional elevator can not be made to operate without power since it requires power to move at all.
Imagine not beeing stuck in the elevator for hours when there is a blackout. A nice possible bonus feature for maglev elevators.
I also don't seen any reason why maglev elevators would not have the same mechanical emergency breaks conventional elevators have for extra safety. Theese breaks could easily be triggered on loss of power or increased acceleration (freefall).

Re:No reason to have a counterweight.

[pnewhook]

Since the elevator requires zero power to go down in a normal fashion, nothing would really stop the elevator designers from making the elevator operate normally even without power. With the simple limitation of not beeing able to go up, of course. A conventional elevator can not be made to operate without power since it requires power to move at all.

Why do you think that a maglev elevator would require no power to move down? Unless of course you mean freefall. But if you want to go down in a controlled fashion you still have to exert an upward force, just not quite so much as to completely overcome gravity.

With complete loss of power the only way to stop a fall would be to engage a mechanical emergency brake. You will still be stuck in the elevator.

Re:No reason to have a counterweight.

[LordVader717]

Why do you think that a maglev elevator would require no power to move down? Unless of course you mean freefall. But if you want to go down in a controlled fashion you still have to exert an upward force, just not quite so much as to completely overcome gravity.

Because no energy is needed. You let it drift down, which will be slower than freefall because of the impedence of the magnetic generator. But yes, it is theoretically falling.

Technically you also exert an upward force, which will be the "friction" whilst falling. But force doesn't equal energy, but rather the product of force and distance does. Because the distance is negative (you're going down) you use negative energy, i.e. you can actually harvest energy from the system.

Re:No reason to have a counterweight.

[pnewhook]

You're right that it will be slower than freefall but won't be that slow. You still need a power source to control the rate of fall to something reasonable.

Re:No reason to have a counterweight.

[AmPz]

No. Take a electric motor. You can easily turn the motor freely if it is not connected to a powersource. Now, short the motor out and try turning it. You can't. It will be locked hard in place. If you want to try something more advanced, put a resistor between the two poles of the motor. Now you should be able to turn the motor, but with some "friction" The energy you used to turn the motor is converted into electricity, and then it is converted into heat in the resistor. Use a lower value resistor to generate more heat, which of course means you will need more energy to turn the motor. A maglev elevator is nothing but a linear motor. It works the same way as a normal electric motor. The maglev elevator will not move if you short it out.

Re:No reason to have a counterweight.

[pnewhook]

What a load of crap. Take a Physics course sometime. You are trying to argue that the elevator will magically hover in place without any power applied. What you are describing is antigravity which doesn't exist, or as a stretch, the actions of a superconducting magnet.

The force you describe is real but is proportional to the velocity of a moving magnet relative to a coil of wire. If there is no relative movement, then there is no force generated. A falling elevator will generate a force (electricity in the coils actually) but it wont be enough to prevent a fatal fall and it certainly wont be strong enough to keep the elevator stationary.

Re:No reason to have a counterweight.

[i41Overlord]

Now, short the motor out and try turning it. You can't. It will be locked hard in place.

This is completely incorrect. You can still turn it, just not as fast. In order for the electromagnet to generate a field, you need electrons flowing through the wire, and they wouldn't be if the motor wasn't turning. Therefore it's impossible for it to be locked hard in place.

Re:No reason to have a counterweight.

[LordVader717]

It doesn't need antigravity, but just a force to counteract the gravitaional force.
If you can't tell the difference, you should take a physics course.

As you correctly point out, an upward force is only exerted when the magnets are moving. Because the gravitational force is constant, and the inductive force increases with the velocity, there will be a point when they cancel each other out and the elevator will drift downward with a constant velocity.

This speed can easily be adapted by changing the resistance in the circuitry.
If it's still to fast, additional rotary generators could mounted to the car.

To stop the car completely and hold it in place, you're going to need mechanical brakes.

Re: Slightly more relevent article

[Lord Bitman]

Though if we want two elevators to use one shaft while multiple people at different possible positions all wait for a single elevator which could potentially intersect the path of another elevator, this one may be more relevent.

yeah, enviromental nightmare

[someone1234]

Also imagine the lots of cables made obsolete by this change, all that will get wasted!

Re:yeah, enviromental nightmare

[Viol8]

Sarcasm might be the lowest form of wit , but you didn't even manage to
get that high.

Re:yeah, enviromental nightmare

[someone1234]

Probably i need a maglev elevator.

Wow, slower *and* more expensive. Alright!

[elrous0]

Is anyone really that uncomforatble in modern conventional elevators? And I haven't heard a loud elevator in years. Why would anyone invest in these *except* for the above-mentioned one-upmanship?

-Eric

Re:Wow, slower *and* more expensive. Alright!

[buck_wild]

I'm sure the first car was somewhat slower than a horse. And if you think elevators aren't loud, try sleeping in a hotel room that's up against the shaft. Good times.

Phone Booth

[wooferhound]

Who Needs a newer way to make an Elevator
All you really need is a well designed Phone Booth

Futurama tubes

[Mugros]

So, everyone gets a metal plate in his trousers and we can use the elevator shafts leike the tubes in Futurama?

ICE-TD

[legalize.ganja.now.]

here you can find a site with lots of pictures and technical information about the ICE-TD.

Re:Great.... just great.

[slashname3]

Bye bye power....better pray those saftey systems are working.

This is why we need more nuclear power plants built now, to support all those mag lev elevators......

Stalled cars? Not a problem

[BranMan]

Stopped cars really wouldn't be a problem. Car arrives at a floor on the 'up' shaft, moves horizontally to between the two shafts, opens doors. People get on and off. Only when the doors are closed does the car move horizontally again to either the 'up or 'down' shaft to get where it is needed next. No other car is interfered with unless it needed to get to THAT floor and the station on that floor was occupied by an open elevator car with Mr. Talksalot.
    So not so big a problem at all - most likely not noticable unless a car was stalled on a popular floor for a long time. And you can easily design a dual station on each floor without taking up too much extra room - problem effectively solved.

Re:Stalled cars? Not a problem

[Inkieminstrel]

How is this better than having two unconnected shafts with an elevator in each?

Re:Stalled cars? Not a problem

[xMilkmanDanx]

Because each car can only hold x people. Having multiple cars per shaft means more people can be moving at a given time.

A pile of heavy cable

[ericspinder]

i don't think those would work too well if the power went out. best to have emergency measures that don't rely on a source of power.

'normal' cable driven elevators have operational problems when the power is out. I don't think that fire codes allow any elevators to be included by anybody's disaster plans, save the fire companies. And even for them it might be much safer, cable driven have numerous long and heavy cables, each of which travel the length of the shaft. Assuming that Otis's inventention still works after a hundred years, I rather have nothing falling on the top of car during a catrostopic failure, than a pile of heavy cable. Imagine up to 70 floors of cable falling on top of a car which may have just felled 20 floors itself (if most of the breaks are at the top of the cable).

Moot

[ari_j]

The word moot, as an adjective, has two definitions that seem odd when put together but both work just fine. A "moot point" is one that is debatable, but irrelevant. You can make a reasonable argument for or against it, but no matter how it comes out, the world will not change at all.

Most political arguments are moot (for instance, it doesn't matter why the US is in Iraq right now - we're there). Law schools have "moot court" where you make legal arguments for cases just like those before, say, the US Supreme Court, but it doesn't matter who wins.

If something is not at all debatable, then it's not moot. If it's debatable but the outcome will have some effect on the world, then it's not moot. Only debatable but pointless arguments are moot. And the argument about whether or not to use induction braking in a maglev elevator is probably moot - the costs of doing it any other way are high and get no return benefits.

Re:Moot

[EvanED]

That makes so much sense. I didn't think about putting the two definitions together like that. Thanks.

Re:Moot

[ari_j]

N/p. And thanks for asking - I was bored this morning otherwise. :)

Re:Great.... just great.

[halltk1983]

3. The computer that controls the current to the fins -- if that's indeed what's being used for propulsion -- malfunctions or is tampered with so that it essentially propels the car down.

Dear Lord... don't let them hook these things up to the net...

Otis

[hawk]

My uncle got fired from their PR department, although his "good to the last drop" slogan would have great success elsewhere . . .

:)

hawk

Old people and arthritis

[mvnicosia]

But can't you just see all the older folks riding the elevator to relieve their arthritis?

Obviously, you've never been to Disneyland

[ChePibe]

They may as well say as you're boarding a ride:

"Parents, please drop off all cash, credit cards, checkbooks, and refinancing documents before boarding the ride. You'll need them to afford the rest of your stay in the magical kingdom!"

"Kids, please begin to cry and demand to go home to make your parents yell at you and make your 'magical day' a living nightmare for all!"

Are the elevator companies paying you?

[Anonymous Coward]

First it was a week's worth of Apple postings, now slashdot has apparently sold out to the elevator companies? Why are you guys posting all these elevator stories? You're such elevator zealots it makes me sick. I don't see stories posted about companies or people working on stairs or escalators. This is just sickening.

Re:In Japan, of course...

[pomo monster]

Yes, there are indeed a lot of antisemites in Japan. My father, for one. It's pretty sickening how often you'll hear talk of the "Jewish world conspiracy," meant in all sincerity.

Re:safety?

[ColaMan]

breaking the cable supporting an elevator will not bring you crashing to Earth.

Unless you happen to ride the one I ride every day, which descends 1km down to where I work at the bottom of a mine. No brakes. It's a pretty fat cable holding it, but there's still a disturbing amount of cable stretch at the bottom level, which causes the whole elevator to slowly oscillate up and down about 4 or 5 inches when it reaches that platform.

I try to think light,happy thoughts when I'm on it. :-)

Magnetic shielding

[Merlyn_3k]

Actually, mu metal is more appropriate for redirecting a constant magnetic field, which barely qualifies as shielding.

A Faraday cage (if grounded) will shield from EM radiation, that is it protects the interior from rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields. Granted, you have to be very careful about any openings into the cage, and be aware of which wavelegths of EM radiation can pass through them.

That said, the field experienced by a passenger is more likely to be stable to within a small degree, but there are ways to design the magnetic circuit to minimize the field inside the elevator. And yes, mu metal would be the logical way to design the circuit, but you hardly need to cover the entire cabin with it.

Um, aren't those called Turbolifts?

[DigitalReverend]

:) I am pretty sure I saw those on star trek.

Re:Um, aren't those called Turbolifts?

[slashname3]

Correct! :)

Re:safety?

[buck_wild]

You call that a worst case? I was thinking of the Vogons finally arriving...

Re:Oh wowee. Just how many can you have?.

[2005g]

You might have to start thinking laterally. Depending upon how they design it, what's to stop the car moving between shafts so cars can hop over to the other shaft when the express is coming up then shift back. That way they only need one biggish shaft and many cars travelling up and down it. p.s. In Australia, they are calls "lifts".

Re: Slightly more relevent article

[Dr. Spork]

Thanks, that was an interesting connection, though certainly not an insoluble problem. The "service route" does not need to be perfectly optimal, it just needs to be good, and debugged.