ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7QlAsxJP-g

by based2 • 9 years ago

248 196 9 years ago

martinko• 9 years ago

There already are rope-free elevators, for instance: - the hydraulic elevator (https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lFWNDQDN2hE/T3nbR7woCAI/AAAAAAAAB...)

-the Paternoster (http://www.audioguideportal.de/assets/Foto/thumbnail520x397/...)

The post title is just clickbait for a ThyssenKrupp commercial, plus it only shows animations of these new elevators. Yawn.

dom08• 9 years ago

plus it only shows animations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7QlAsxJP-g#t=58s

devdoomari• 9 years ago

I'd rather not ride a paternoster --- seems quite likely to function as an execution machine :(

mschuster912• 9 years ago

Nope. The first 25cm in front of the cabin opening are a flap, which means it will not shear your head off.

ManuelKiessling• 9 years ago

There are several Paternosters in operation where I work (HBC Europe HQ in Cologne), and they are very cleverly designed in subtle ways to work around the likelihood of an execution.

userbinator2• 9 years ago

"World's first 3D people mover" might be a more appropriate --- and enticing --- title, because "rope-free" can also refer to hydraulic elevators (which have been around for over a century.)

londons_explore4• 9 years ago

As far as I can see, the design only allows 2D movement. If you wanted the lift to move toward or away from the camera, you would need either some kind of 2nd attachment point on a different side.

samstave4• 9 years ago

why couldn't a horizontal segment have a curve to change the Z axis by whatever angle you wanted to get to.

Also, they could have a completely circular horizontal segment to move people through an upper level of a round building - like a stadium...

userbinator2• 9 years ago

They could use the bottom of the car.

tootie2• 9 years ago

The rendering of the cabin traversing a skyway looked it followed some kind of bend.

tajen• 9 years ago

We could also check whether "The Willy Wonka elevator" arouses more curiosity: It's a feature of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book (and in the movie from Tim Burton).

tootie2• 9 years ago

3D Railway Pod? Seems like it follow tracks and switch lines like a train only it can also go up and down. It's a step close to the Great Glass Elevator.

saidajigumi• 9 years ago

Excellent, looks like we’re finally on the path to the turbolifts from Star Trek!

joatmon-snoo• 9 years ago

I was thinking more along the line of Willy Wonka's glass elevators :p

Naushad• 9 years ago

Interesting, they are basically Trains running vertically switching tracks.

the84722• 9 years ago

Getting closer to Turbolifts. Canonically they form a network throughout the ship, use induction motors, can also go sideways, have multiple cabins in the shafts, switch routes etc. No inertial dampeners of course.

netsharc• 9 years ago

Off-topic, who is the narrator? I think I've heard him on another German "corporate presentation" video, and I can hear a slight German accent...

And back on-topic, googling to find the details instead of just a flashy video, here's Tom Scott on MULTI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI

dom08• 9 years ago

He sounds somewhat similar to the kurzgesagt voice-over artist.

sschueller• 9 years ago

I have heard him before as well narrating stuff I'm German. Sadly I have no idea who he is.

leeoniya6• 9 years ago

looks expensive to build, purchase and maintain.

not sure there's anything "revolutionary" here.

sharpercoder• 9 years ago

If the rails are solid state using for example magnetic levitation, I can see this being much cheaper to maintain.

samstave4• 9 years ago

Ever been in an elevator during a power outage?

Overtonwindow4• 9 years ago

The cable/belt mechanism of elevators has remained largely unchanged for most of it's history because of its simplicity in design, manufacturing, and maintenance. This new system is absolutely beautiful, but I agree, it looks expensive. Elevators have to work 24/7 with little maintenance, it will be very interesting to see this in the real world.

DanBlake• 9 years ago

Looks to be about.... 10? times the cost of a normal elevator if I had to guess. I bet the maintenance costs are fun as well. As such, doubt you will see these except in niche buildings (things like the porsche tower, etc..)

the84722• 9 years ago

The tallest skyscrapers have issues with elevators because the cables can only be so long before they snap under their own weight, so you need elevator changing floors, which take up space and lower throughput. Either you find flexible materials with a higher tensile-strength to weight ratio than steel or you forego cables entirely.

dom08• 9 years ago

Classic elevators also need a lot of floor space to achieve good throughput. This system is basically like a paternoster on steroids; it can rise much higher, move much faster, use arbitrary circuits and has none of the safety issues. Even if this system only saves, say, 40 % floor space, it'd still be a win for many projects.

nabla93• 9 years ago

Kone UltraRope carbon fiber core hoisting rope allows 1 kilometer.

kentf• 9 years ago

So many negative comments for a Saturday. This is a marvel of engineering and deserves a celebration. Humbled by our ability to re-invent more and more. Well done to all involved.

occultist_throw• 9 years ago

Indeed! It reminds me of the root foundations of a TurboLift from Star Trek.

sabujp2• 9 years ago

I always thought that they used the vacuum of space to accelerate and decelerate those

nabla93• 9 years ago

I hope HN could avoid mindless cheering and positivity related to technology matters. Negative or positive comments that only express private feeling should be discouraged. They reduce the value of the discussion.

Interesting technological discussion means criticizing.

Eridrus• 9 years ago

I feel like they didn't really do much to motivate this.

Some of the comments here about increasing throughput provide clearer motivation - they do show this super briefly in the video with elevators operating in a cycle, but the benefits didn't really click.

CydeWeys4• 9 years ago

This might be a little bit premature. I'd want to see broad commercial success before celebrating it as a marvel of engineering.

Systems like this have been invented repeatedly throughout the decades, but they never succeeded for one reason or another. The problem isn't in coming up with the concept (or, now, making animated 3D renderings), it's in making it actually work well.

This, incidentally, is why so many of us are so ecstatic about SpaceX -- because they've made something amazing that actually works.

riffic2• 9 years ago

Simplicity in design should be what we celebrate, and things that actually make it into production. All this is for now is a slick video.

freehunter• 9 years ago

Eh... Rube Goldberg Machines are often celebrated as being of interesting design, and they are created with the expressed purpose of being overly complicated. There is room in the world for very clever engineering, very complicated engineering, very elegant engineering, and everything in between.

lathiat3• 9 years ago

It is actually in production, here's the working test version in a tower they built just for it, by Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI

And it has it's first production project in the OVG East Side Tower Berlin (though not yet finished building)

dclowd9901• 9 years ago

I hate to be so cynical, but for how often the TK elevator in our building is out of service (these things have been around for 100 years and still break down more than a Fiat), I don't have the confidence necessary to step foot in this thing.

dom08• 9 years ago

Time out of service has much more to do with who services them.

Rjevski• 9 years ago

Note that a TK elevator doesn't mean it's actually still maintained by TK. For example in my previous building there was an Otis elevator but at some point the maintenance stickers on it became TK's, probably because they offered a cheaper maintenance contract.

TLDR: the manufacturer can't do much about the owner not maintaining their product properly.

stinos• 9 years ago

Came to post a similar comment. Of course it's anecdotal, but in our old building we had a +20 years old Schindler's lift (yes that sounds very close to Schindler's List, the joke is never far away) and in the 5 years I was there I never saw them failing. In a new building no single month passes by without one of the TK elevators needing servicing, at worst multiple times a week. And if they're in service there are still always chances they forget the floor entered or one of the special programs for limited access areas stops working. Definitely software problems but might also be hardware related sometimes. Like the doors sliding open a couple of mm then closing again, until the technician shows up once again. I know that doesn't mean all their products are like that and maybe human error is at fault here, but it ceryainly does not leave the same good impression as the Schindler's ones.

icebraining3• 9 years ago

My previous workplace had a couple of Schindlers, which failed multiple times per year.

Kluny• 9 years ago

Sometimes you get cheap landlords who try to avoid paying for routine maintenance, so you get emergency shutdowns instead.

LoSboccacc3• 9 years ago

Weird you say that. Fiat engines are so reliable most other constructors use a FIRE or a common rail derivative in their compact segment. Here there are uncountable 90s and 00s punto panda and the likes, still marching after few couple hundred thousand kilometers. Drove one myself to 250000, with minimal issues and regular maintenance. Now driving a "famously unreliable" Alfa and just passed 100kkm with zero issues yet. Never have been left on the road by them, and the alfa drove me all the way from milano to dublin and back, after multiple track days.

samstave4• 9 years ago

My dad was is an elevator repair man, has been for the last 33 years. When I asked him what he thought about his job, he said "just like any other, it has its ups and downs"

But after seeing this, now we are going back and forth on the future of the industry!

kumarvvr• 9 years ago

Impressive video. The implementation looks complicated and might have reliability issues.

Wonder what tech they use for traction while moving vertically.

dom08• 9 years ago

Its the same for all directions, i.e. linear motors.

nabla93• 9 years ago

They have to have a good plan for cases when things break and electricity is not available. Firemen and maintenance crews must be able to rescue people from the elevators stuck in positions with minimum training and tools.

samstave4• 9 years ago

The real problem I see with this, is the complexity of the components required to make anything seen in this video is orders of magnitudes more that vertical shaft versions -- thus the cost of an elevator will me massive.

What are the seismic implications - the tolerances on the XY intersections are surely tight.

How the hell would you inspect some of the complex systems.

You would need a sensor car that just roams the tracks measuring tolerance levels - make it a service car that repairmen can be in which has no walls. You'd be more cost effective putting all your large sensor objects in a car as opposed to thousands of them throughout the system

What happens when a rotating intersection piece fails and its the only route a car can take/the piece fails with a car on that portion of track - there is no door/escape/access to the passengers in that scenario.

Also - the building would require extra height to accommodate horizontal passages if the intersection between XY cant happen at ingress/egress points. If they DO happen at such points - what happens when E1 wants to go right and E2 wants to go left. one car need to give way, then get back on track to go... routing conflicts could occur frequently - like the skyway connectors between towers where that Sim takes the car from tower1 to tower2 but he gets out of the middle of a row of doors....

And as mentioned, elevators are already not that cheap - I don think all but the Nakatomi Plaza and Ono Sendai HQ buildings could afford these yet...

Actually - There are buildings with primary structural elements on there external (HSBC Building in Hong Kong, for example) -- So I could see this as an external bolt-on layer to the side of a building - as opposed to a network of tunnels and shafts throughout - but then that eliminates a majority of the horizontal movement, unless it wraps onto two sides of a building...

revelation• 9 years ago

Soo many machined pieces... wonder if that is the production design.

SomewhatLikely• 9 years ago

Accelerating and decelerating in line with gravity is a lot more forgiving on the occupants than lateral accelerations. Seems like this would put a big limit on horizontal movement.

ChuckMcM3• 9 years ago

Depends on whether or not the car can 'tilt' while it is moving sideways (I know they don't show it doing so). If it can then any amount of acceleration can be presented as 'up' and 'down' force to the occupants much like a plane.

aaron_m042• 9 years ago

Sounds complex and expensive.

ant6n• 9 years ago

Well, tilting itself involves acceleration, which will be perceived differently in different parts of the cabin... So there are still and issues.

usrusr2• 9 years ago

True, but I guess that enough value will lie in just being able to put a whole fleet of cabins into a small number of one way shafts. Horizontal travel with people inside is a gimmick, but a very illustrative one. I expect early adopters to overuse it for showing off and later regret it quite a bit, for the reasons you stated.

212• 9 years ago

Actually they say that horizontal movement is critical. Because in the morning when all elevators go up, they need another shaft to return them down and make a loop.

heipei• 9 years ago

Like buses and trams put a limit on horizontal movement? ;) Honestly though, as long as the change of direction is somehow indicated in advance, and the acceleration isn't too abrupt, there shouldn't be anything limiting the horizontal travel distance.

londons_explore4• 9 years ago

My ideal elevator would accelerate at a pleasant 4 m/s^2 and have a jerk not exceeding 4 m/s^3. It would have doors that close instantly when the doorway is clear, and start right away.

That would be able to take me up a 100 yard high building in 11 seconds.

Why can't real elevators be like that? Why must the doors move slowly, and wait for 5 seconds before even starting moving? Why does the elevator reach a sluggish top speed, even with very little load? Why when arriving at the destination floor does it take a further 2 or 3 seconds for the door to open?

mabbo3• 9 years ago

I can think of three possible reasons why not, all equally likely:

1- no one has bothered.

2- it's been tried, something terrible happened and now they don't try it anymore.

3- it's been tried, but the extra cost doesn't cover the extra benefit. No one wants to pay for it.

All that said, I was at a hotel once that had, to my mind, perfect acceleration like you describe. No one else cared, but I was blown away by it.

LoSboccacc3• 9 years ago

People with reduced mobility or reduced vision will love instant closing guilliotines.

jjoonathan3• 9 years ago

The door closing mechanism is designed with limited power and there's an optical sensor to prevent it from even trying to close on someone. Why wouldn't that still be the case on a fast closing door?

More tellingly: fast closing doors are absolutely a thing, so clearly the safety issues are not insurmountable, but I only see them in more modern/expensive locations. I suspect it's a price grading move and if you wait another century fast-closing doors will be everywhere.

londons_explore4• 9 years ago

A sensor to detect a clear doorway is straightforward.

Doors that have sensitive rubber edges that can detect hitting something and engage a lock within milliseconds are also trivial.

The two methods combined mean that you have safety for soft human fleshy bits incase either malfunctions, yet the door can still be moving at 15 mph or more and close in 100 milliseconds.

jjoonathan3• 9 years ago

Don't forget the part where they disable the door close button and add a 10 second wait time!

My favorite bit, though, is where they lock the escape hatch from the outside and provide no "alarm will sound" override mechanism. That way if the elevator dies you'll be stuck there for hours until they can get the fire department on the scene.

bikezen• 9 years ago

Forcing people to be stuck waiting for hours is usually preferable to having untrained and untethered people climbing around active elevator shafts N floors up.

krylon• 9 years ago

Many, many years ago, I read news headline about a man being decapitated by an elevator.

So my guess is that the slowness has to do with safety.

Animats5• 9 years ago

If the elevator ascends too fast, riders' ears will pop, and some people, especially those with colds, will experience ear pain. Some high speed elevators (Tapei 101, at least) pressurize the elevator cab so they can control the rate of air pressure change. But that runs the cost way up.

Doors have to close slowly for safety. There's a limit on how much kinetic energy (7 foot-pounds, from memory) can be in a closing door. Opening can be much faster, and on high-speed elevators, it usually is.

At the destination floor, there's often a delay for precise leveling. Position feedback for leveling is just limit switches until you get to the really fancy high-speed elevators, so it works by shifting to slow speed and inching until the switch trips. Fancier elevators used analog optical systems and inductive systems that gave an analog signal of leveling error. Here's a modern elevator position sensor, with a bar code strip running the height of the shaft.[1]

Precision position and speed control of large motors was really hard in the 20th century.

[1] https://www.cedes.com/documents/produkte/Broschueren/108783e...

londons_explore4• 9 years ago

I love that position sensor. It doesn't say how the code on the strip is determined, but I'd like to imagine it's some kind of gold code so the sensor can find the position even if 99% or more of the code is occluded with dust or dirt.

leeoniya6• 9 years ago

what problem does this solve to justify the crazy expense, complexity and maintenance?

the reason elevators exist is because people cannot easily climb 100+ vertical ft, especially while carrying stuff.

on the other hand, humans are well adapted for horizontal travel - 15mi per day without breaking a sweat. and when they're not, there are movable walkways like in airports.

this whole thing is a solution looking for a problem, IMO. we don't yet live in Matrix-style human incubators with miles of horizontal travel in buildings that are also miles high - it's usually either/or, and not because we've been lacking these revolutionary elevators.

chki• 9 years ago

If those elevators worked they would actually solve a big engineering problem: Very High Buildings can only have a limited number of elevator shafts. But it takes a significant time to use them which makes it problematic if there are a lot of people who want to go. But if elevators were able to travel horizontally that is a first step towards having multiple elevators in one shaft. There are still other problems that need to be solved in order to do this but if it works you can easily transport a lot of people in skyscrapers by having one "upwards" shaft and one "down" shaft which the elevator capsule can change between by moving horizontally.

leeoniya6• 9 years ago

you can have dedicated up and down shafts where the cars move horizontally only at the top and bottom, like a ferris wheel. without having them move horizontally at any floor. you just need a way to disconnect the rope (like ski lifts). or you can have towing cars that have only 50 ft of rope and operate on rails (like ships that get towed through Panama locks)

rmccue• 9 years ago

what problem does this solve to justify the crazy expense, complexity and maintenance?

Elevators have a natural height limit, due to the weight of the rope, which is why taller buildings need sky lobbies. You also can't (really) increase the capacity of a single elevator shaft with a traditional rope-based system.

legulere• 9 years ago

It solves the problem that you can only have on cabin (or two) in an elevator shaft. That's very inefficient in super-tall buildings. With horizontal travel elevator cabins can go out of their way and enable much better usage of elevator shafts. Further you become independent of the total length of the elevator shaft. So you drop another limiting factor to super-tall buildings.

russdill2• 9 years ago

Elevators share a similar problem to rockets. Only instead of the rocket tyranny, it's the elevator shaft tyranny. At a certain point, making a building taller can subtract from the square footage because of the extra shafts required.

With a linear motor system, more elevators can be added without adding shafts. Part of making that possible is allowing elevators to change shafts.

leeoniya6• 9 years ago

the limiting factor is that shafts havr to accommodate bidirectional movement and using a rope only allows 1 per shaft.

you can solve this by having the cars on rails and having unidirectional shafts where the cars only travel horizontally at top and bottom. this would allow muliple elevators per shaft.

Overtonwindow4• 9 years ago

I think this solves a number of problems. Foremost the horizontal movement between buildings. China has a lot of these towers and typically there's skyways to walk across. An elevator that moves horizontally could make it easier to move from 1st of one building to 30th of another. Another point made in the video is that the elevators can move around one another. Solving the issue we have now of a single shaft moving one car to multiple, busy destinations (i.e. the morning rush) allowing multiple cars to use the same shaft to work around one another. All in all I think this is aiming to solve the two greatest problems: time, and cost.

mabbo3• 9 years ago

This will be how we build towers twice as tall as existing megatowers.

As beautifully explained by xkcd[0], "If your building has lots of floors, you need lots of different elevators, since there would be so many people trying to come and go the same time. If you make a building too tall, the whole thing gets taken up by elevators and there's no space for regular rooms."

But if one elevator shaft can have multiple independent cars, suddenly you've got a huge capacity multiplier without the space costs.

The horizontal motion part is cute, but I don't think it will matter nearly as much.

[0]https://what-if.xkcd.com/94/

robotresearcher2• 9 years ago

The car motion is not independent and it's hard to use the capacity well. Consider the morning rush in a big office tower when everyone starts on the ground floor. You can only use the bottom car to move these people.

You need a sideways dimension of movement to avoid this problem.

mabbo3• 9 years ago

Oh, definitely, I agree. You need at least 2 (probably 3 or 4 for extra redundancy) shafts. But you need them to be usually one-way shafts. So everyone going up gets in at the same door, and the empty cars can fly down the other side to be ready to take more people up.

notatoad• 9 years ago

You need a sideways dimension of movement to avoid this problem.

you mean like the elevator system being discussed here?

dingo_bat• 9 years ago

This is awesome! Hopefully this means the elevator can now directly open into my apartment!

veli_joza• 9 years ago

This is exciting possibility, but I would expect the builders will try to minimize the volume taken by shaft. Corridors are less expensive to build and maintain than these high-tech shafts.

armitron• 9 years ago

Reminded me of CPU interconnects.

sabujp2• 9 years ago

crossbar

ChuckMcM3• 9 years ago

The follow up video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OBHUZetYIU was a bit more interesting. It shows the mockup system running through a variety of transitions.

I'd be interested in why they decided to make the 'track' as complex as they did. The transition nodes are an amazing mechanism but it seems also a likely failure point.

212• 9 years ago

It's explained in another video. Those "tracks" are linear motors, with periodic electro magnetic coils.

Looks like it will be crazily expensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI

rl12345• 9 years ago

Beautifully made and well-structured video. In just 120 seconds, they effectively:

I. Set the stage by showing a trend.

II. Describe two premises and derive a logical conclusion from them.

III. Show a product that not only is the objective answer to the conclusion above but also fits perfectly into the initial narrative.

panic• 9 years ago

Looking forward to playing SimTower Multi!

SeeDave• 9 years ago

Absolutely incredible video, and great product!

alfanick• 9 years ago

Schedulers for Multi must be fun - I'm sure they must have employed a whole research group for solving this problem. Scheduling simple elavator systems is still a problem nowadays, this one? It's so much harder.

brink• 9 years ago

Nothing a little deep learning can't solve. Right? Right guys?

minus7• 9 years ago

Sounds like it'd be a fun game

stdclass• 9 years ago

http://play.elevatorsaga.com/

There you go. Lost so many hours playing this game though.

m_eiman• 9 years ago

SimTower started life as an elevator simulator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower

gruturo2• 9 years ago

I'm rather sure they haven't.

Source: Myself, working in a high-rise building served by ~20 ThyssenKrupp elevators, 10 of which actually share 5 shafts (they're not the ropeless version though, AFAIK), and the scheduling sucks big time. We got them to informally acknowledge that they're being wiped every night to get around some nasty bugs, so they never learn traffic patterns, but even then it's infuriating to see how crap they are even on a Sunday with the building empty.

35bge57dtjku3• 9 years ago

I've seen them work ok in an office building with ~15 floors and 6 elevators until lunch time, when the extra traffic made them take far longer than it seemed they should have.

I'm guessing those didn't detect if no one got in the car and they still went to all their scheduled floors.

todd8• 9 years ago

Kind of reminds me of IP packets, but of people not bits. They could even travel underground from building to building and then we would have an internet of elevators transmitting packets of people (hopefully with reliable delivery and no dropped packets).

danielvf2• 9 years ago

The big benefit is that you get more than one elevator per shaft. For skyscrapers the amount of floor space wasted by elevators grows exponentially by the number of floors.

Say you have a 5 story building that needs a one shaft elevator. 5 floors tiles 100 sqft per floor is 500 sqft of wasted shaft space. Then say you have a 10 story building that needs two shafts. Now you are wasting 10 floors times two shafts or 2,000 sqft. And so on.

An old and terrifing solution to this was to use two shafts and run a continuous loop of open door elevators.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro3Fc_yG3p0

anoother• 9 years ago

Paternosters. You say terrifying, I say fun.

There's one in Leicester University (not the only one in the UK, I'm sure).

Really not that dangerous, with a cable near the top of each aperture that triggers a stop if it's touched.

stcredzero3• 9 years ago

The SF garage my fiancee parks in has this thing made from an industrial belt, with steps bolted onto it. I think there are quite a few of those in Stuttgart as well, though they are being fazed out. It's very efficient, but not for ze stupits!

christoph• 9 years ago

There's one in the library at Essex University as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvn06yQIb9o

I'm glad they still have it, I was nervous when I searched that I would find out it had been ripped out since I was last there.

itcrowd• 9 years ago

This is right if you assume constant floor area for increasingly taller buildings. I think taller buildings require more floor space and that offsets the increase (at least somewhat).

spookyuser• 9 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgJBD1wf-YQ Here is Tom Scott's video about the continuous loop elevator's.

lathiat3• 9 years ago

Better video :-)

mindleyhilner• 9 years ago

Sorry to sound stupid, but how is that exponential? Isn't it O(mn) where m = number of floors and n = number of shafts?

EDIT: Unless there's some dependence between m and n, like if taller buildings always need more shafts or something.

JumpCrisscross2• 9 years ago

like if taller buildings always need more shafts or something

The dependence is on keeping wait times reasonable. Taller buildings mean each shaft's elevator spends more time travelling, i.e. less time being available.

rtkwe• 9 years ago

Taller buildings need more shafts because they'll spend more time in transit so unless the occupants have the patience of saints you need lots shafts to keep wait times down. Eventually most tall buildings setup sky lobbies and express lifts that only service a certain range of floors to keep wait times down during peak hours.

It's really rough in convention center hotels when a huge convention comes to town a lot of the time it's practically impossible to get an elevator down from the middle floors because it's already full from the floors above you.

beefman• 9 years ago

That's polynomial growth

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+*+f+*+ceil(f%2F10)

danielvf2• 9 years ago

I deserved that.

My examples understate the real life problem though.

This missing factor is that it also costs more shaft time to serve a higher floor with a longer travel distance than it does a lower floor with a shorter travel distance. So in the simple elevator case, people from floor one hundred are going to be spending more time in the shaft than people from floor ten.

Still not exponential, but cubic-ish growth puts a hard limit on things.

lobster_johnson2• 9 years ago

The space isn't wasted if it's used to transport people, though.

BurningFrog• 9 years ago

In an n floor building, nobody is being transported in n-1 floors.

tbabb• 9 years ago

You can't put more tenants in it and charge them rent.

smoyer2• 9 years ago

I rode one of those "terrifying" elevators in the '90s in Frankfurt DE and it wasn't actually scary. I could in fact be dangerous but people are pretty smart about not being stupid near them. I will admit that we taped a piece of paper to the floor to make sure the cabin (which was completely carpeted) didn't flip over at the top before we rode it the whole way around.

e12e3• 9 years ago

Could you expand on your "safety paper"? Was it taped to the top floor, as a signal to get out?

DenisM2• 9 years ago

Perhaps you could just hang two elevators on one set of cables in the same shaft? They will have to move in sync and the range will be cut in half, but the throughput will nearly double during the rush hour. In a tall building could be an acceptable tradeoff.

jdavis703• 9 years ago

That makes it a lot harder to have a dramatic lobby, which is an important component of most skyscrapers.

wlesieutre3• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-deck_elevator is like that, but right on top of each other so the range isn't reduced.

Most people are going between the ground floor and whatever floor their destination is on, so a shaft with two cars that go 0-50 and 51-100 wouldn't be very useful.

35bge57dtjku3• 9 years ago

Why not invent and install spiral escalators? That would give you the high throughput of the paternoster more safely. You could still have a few elevators for travel between the higher up 'elevator lobbies' people mentioned.

kurthr• 9 years ago

Wow, cool... they have! http://gizmodo.com/feast-your-eyes-on-the-worlds-largest-spi...

There must be more spiral escalators now. I know there's one in Nordstrom's too.

ChristianGeek2• 9 years ago

Am I the only one who noticed that the first elevator shown in the video, while the narrator discussed the birth of the elevator in 1854, is gear-based and hence rope-free?!

snatoeuhsnta• 9 years ago

The first elevator is a Elisha Otis demonstration of the elevator brake. You can see the rope snap, and the teeth on the side stop the elevator. The gears were presumable to pull the rope up for the demo.

Animats5• 9 years ago

That's Otis's original safety elevator, and it was a rope system. The innovation was that it had a mechanism to stop it if the rope broke.

ChristianGeek2• 9 years ago

Ah, thanks for the clarification...the animation made it look like it was the gear system that was controlling the movement.

PhasmaFelis2• 9 years ago

Good to know. I saw the animation as a snipe at roped elevators, freezeframing just as the elevator fails and goes into freefall. It makes more sense knowing the history.

Overtonwindow4• 9 years ago

Anytime I see something about elevators I am reminded of this amazingly detailed, and highly engrossing article on the life and history of elevators.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-dow...

GrayShade• 9 years ago

I think the routing algorithms could be interesting. It's funny to think about the possibility of gridlocked elevators.

Overtonwindow4• 9 years ago

Aside, for those interested in the music behind the video, it's an original composition, and you can learn more and download it here: http://www.urban-hub.com/de/people/der-videoproduzent-der-mu...

Animats5• 9 years ago

The elevator industry has been playing around with multi-cab systems for many years. The Otis Odyssey system (1997) [1] had cabs that could move both horizontally and vertically. The cabs were more like containers carried vertically in ordinary elevators and slid out sideways for horizontal movement. Otis built a full-sized prototype, but nobody ever ordered one.

Otis considered ropeless elevators, but in 1997 it looked like it would increase the energy consumption by 7X. Without counterweights, the motors have to do a lot more work. But maybe Multi can recover some of the energy via regeneration.

There are automated parking garages that can move cars sideways.[2] Those go back to the 1960s, and tend to be high-maintenance.

The Multi system looks really complicated mechanically. All those moving parts. Worse, they're on vertical surfaces in the shafts, where maintenance will be difficult. With regular elevators, the high-maintenance items are in the machine room. This will probably go into some prestige tower, but not be replicated much.

[1] http://www.barkermohandas.com/images/Integrated%20Vertical%2...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3vtpGtyw1k

mpalmer• 9 years ago

Worse, they're on vertical surfaces in the shafts, where maintenance will be difficult.

Maybe - but movement on two axes lets you get creative with your tools. You could for instance store a "maintenance car" with special fittings that expose the shaft mechanisms. The car could be introduced into the system as needed and removed when it would just be in the way.

pm902• 9 years ago

Wow. Kinda off topic, but looking at the complexity of the automatic parking garage makes me wonder whether, in the future, growth of jobs will look like, e.g. automatic parking garage repairer...

dredmorbius2• 9 years ago

My first read is that this system would be useful for inventory or parts management / movement. Rather than pepole movement, cargo.

This would also be 1) more forgiving of "whooses", and of what I suspect are going to be some pervasive acceleration and directional issues.

Crates of goods don't get motion-sick.

danieltillett3• 9 years ago

I am wondering if the solution is to use modular counterweights that can also be moved sideways and swapped around too.

kodfodrasz5• 9 years ago

I wonder how you wonder to use that.

Do you know the principle of a traditional elevator, and the role of a counterweight?

frik• 9 years ago

A forgotten concept is the Paternoster elevator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster

A paternoster lift is a passenger elevator which consists of a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping. Passengers can step on or off at any floor they like. The same technique is also used for filing cabinets to store large amounts of (paper) documents or for small spare parts. The much smaller belt manlift which consists of an endless belt with steps and rungs but no compartments is also sometimes called a paternoster.

Nowadays certain safety concerns from the 1970s could be solved by incorporating modern safety features like auto-stop, automatic doors, etc in newly built ones. Express elevators could be built too, if they skip certain floors.

nneonneo• 9 years ago

The resulting internal transportation network enabled by this system resembles a public transit tramway system more than it resembles a traditional elevator system - and I'm willing to bet that isn't accidental. As skyscrapers become bigger and more ubiquitous, it seems natural that their internal transit systems would get correspondingly more complex, and borrowing from public transit seems like a perfectly natural way to solve the problem.

Plus, in this system all the elevators are centrally scheduled and therefore there won't be any concern about human drivers fouling up the system :)

CydeWeys4• 9 years ago

I had a chance recently to ask the famous architect David Adjaye what new upcoming technology he thought would change architecture in the coming years, like how steel beams and reinforced concrete allowed the skyscraper innovation from the last century, and his answer was immediate: 3D elevator systems.

Apparently traditional linear elevator systems are really limiting as far as what can be accomplished with skyscrapers, to the point that a famous architect sees fully flexible 3D people mover systems inside a building as being the next big innovation to radically change what cities look like.

closeparen• 9 years ago

Interesting point. Buildings that are very large on the horizontal plane (like the Pentagon) have adopted systems of personal transport like bicycles and Segways. But I guess there's no reason why the elevator model shouldn't work horizontally.

Still, elevators in general are more like ridesharing than public transit: they move according to the requests they receive in real time (with some central planning influence), rather than on a schedule set by committee months or years prior.

ajarmst2• 9 years ago

Poor choice of title. It may be the first direct-drive or non-linear elevator, but rope and cable-free hydraulic elevators have been in service for decades.

PhasmaFelis2• 9 years ago

One issue I haven't seen addressed is that the horizontal shafts will block foot traffic through the building.

dredmorbius2• 9 years ago

Solutions: Have an elevator plane on the building -- shafts and corridors which are all located at one extreme side of the building, rather than the core.

And/or have horizontal transit floors. You don't need horizontal transit at every floor, just sufficiently frequently to accomplish lateral transfers.

jjoe• 9 years ago

This might read a bit odd and tangential but I cringe every time I get into a ThyssenKrupp elevator. Thyssen and Krupp were huge fans of Hitler and the Nazis. The two families donated large sums of money to their cause. They both benefited from Hitler's support and promoted the use of forced labor. ThyssenKrupp is largely seen as a Hitler firm in many circles.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThyssenKrupp

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp

[2] http://spartacus-educational.com/GERthyssen.htm

dom08• 9 years ago

The case of Thyssen is actually quite interesting, because he was an avid Hitler supporter in the early 1930s, but later heavily opposed Nazi policies and fled the country.

pm902• 9 years ago

Many of the progenitors of modern Japanese companies were heavily involved in assisting the Imperial Japanese government during WW2 as well. Although US did dismantle a lot of the zaibatsu's after the war.

makarb• 9 years ago

You know what, nobody cares about that anymore. Only those who desperately want to be seen as victims.

altstar• 9 years ago

I think you can give it a rest. It has been 70 years.

riffic2• 9 years ago

Wow, just more over-engineered mechanical shit that will break down in spectacular ways.

lathiat3• 9 years ago

Here's a tour of the system in their test tower by Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI

And it has it's first production project in the OVG East Side Tower Berlin (though not yet finished building)

cable2600• 9 years ago

One step closer to the Wonkavader. Which always freaked me out that it could move anywhere and even fly.

amai• 9 years ago

I posted this more than 2 weeks ago and nobody seemed interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807079

ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]

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