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

[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

[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

[AddressException]

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

Remind me never to go on that ride! ;)

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

[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

[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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

8. RIAA approved.

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

[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

[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

[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.

Hope this is more than.

[bstadil]

one-upman ship

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)

The downside this didn't mention?

[AWhiteFlame]

It will confuse the hell out of your pacemaker.

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?

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!

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

[Goaway]

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

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: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.

Good work

[r00b]

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

Mag-lev technology has its ups and downs

[ian_mackereth]

The body of this post has been left deliberately blank

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.

Just hope...

[wildsurf]

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

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: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.

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.

Re:Story was corrected

[slughead]

3,314 fps would be INSANE.

Yeah, especially considering my monitor only does 125Hz.

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!

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.

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.