Engineers Develop 'Ultrarope' For World's Highest Elevator

HughPickens.com writes: Halfway up the Shard, London's tallest skyscraper, you are asked to step out of the elevator at the transfer floor, or "sky lobby," a necessary inconvenience in order to reach the upper half of the building, and a symptom of the limits of elevators today. To ascend a mile-high (1.6km) tower using the same technology could necessitate changing elevators as many as 10 times. Elevators traveling distances of more than 500m [1,640 ft] have not been feasible because the weight of the steel cables themselves becomes so great. Now, after nine years of rigorous testing, Kone has released Ultrarope — a material composed of carbon-fiber covered in a friction-proof coating that weighs a seventh of the steel cables, making elevators of up to 1km (0.6 miles) in height feasible to build.

Kone's creation was chosen to be installed in what's destined to become the world's tallest building, the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. When completed in 2020, the tower will stand a full kilometer in height, and will boast the world's tallest elevator at 660m (2,165ft). A 1km-tall tower may seem staggering, but is this the build-able limit? Most probably not, according to Dr. Sang Dae Kim. "With Kingdom Tower we now have a design that reaches around 1 km in height. Later on, someone will push for 1 mile, and then 2 km," says Kim. He adds that, technically speaking, 2 km might be possible at the current time. Anything higher would require new materials and building techniques.

Comments

What?/ Just 2 Km? That's it?!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

So I guess the space elevator is not coming any time soon.

Re:just put a motor on the elevator itself

[Anonymous Coward]

You still need a counterweight or else you are lifting the entire mass of the elevator instead of just passengers. That means a cable.

Armchair engineering at its finest

[mcrbids]

I'm probably going to lose some karma for this...

I, too, could come with a half-dozen answers that would be "far superior" to what 100+ years of the finest minds in the industry could come up with. But in reality, I really, seriously doubt that my designs would hold up because there's a *reason* that things are done the way they are.

Mechanical engineering is a *very old* industry, and any radical, new design would have significant hurdles to pass before it could be accepted and used in a real scenario. The cost of failure is very high and there are real lives on the line.

My first thought was to use something like a caterpillar drive along the sides of the shaft, each of which would operate like a mini elevator for perhaps 10 floors. But, very quickly, I can see that this type of system would have many, many more moving parts and consequently many more points of failure.

So, I think it *might* be best to trust that 100+ years of experience are, in fact, at work, and that we should first understand that there is *real knowledge* at work before assuming that our half-baked and thoroughly unproven ideas hold any merit in reality.... ?

Re:LSM

[Warbothong]

Well this is the best thing I've seen! Why haven't these been pushed out into the commercial area?

For the same reason that maglev trains and HyperLoop-style vacuum tubes aren't ubiquitous: sending a dumb carriage along a smart track is far more expensive than sending a smart carriage along a dumb track, since there's much more track than there is carriage.

Narrowboats used to be the best way of moving materials around in-land, but "laying the track" (digging the canals, building the locks, etc.) took a lot of work.

Dumb boats were overshadowed by smarter locomotives: more difficult and expensive to build, but ran on much cheaper tracks.

Locomotives were overshadowed by smarter automobiles: more difficult to invent and require a smarter fuel network, but in some cases don't need *any* track laying.

The same argument applies to lifts: it's much cheaper to have a smart motor at the top and/or a smart carriage, with 660m of dumb shaft and cable, than having 660m of smart shaft.