WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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

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

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In June 2016, I travelled to Genoa in Italy,

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and I saw an elevator that also moved sideways.

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Except, spoiler, it's a bit of a cheat,

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it's actually a little horizontal car

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

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And now, it is June 2017.

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

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

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their actual, full-size, working elevator

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that moves sideways without cheating.

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

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

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

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I know that exactly, because I walked up once!

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This is a building made almost entirely of
elevator shafts.

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Some of them test regular lifts,

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but some of them are reserved
for this new system.

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The principle of having
a continuous rotating flow of cars

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was one of the best inventions
in our industry ever.

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

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And to have this exchange, we need an exchanger,

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which you see just behind me.

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And this exchanger allows us
to go into horizontal movement.

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The exchanger can be placed at every point
in the shaft

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so it allows us to do all kinds of configurations.

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

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One of the problems with elevators
in really tall buildings

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

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

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

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It uses linear induction motors.

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

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And you maybe know it from a rotating motor.

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

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and just lay it on a table flat,

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then you already have a linear drive.

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

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

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you've got cables holding the cab,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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So before this is allowed to carry humans,

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this system needs to be at least as failsafe.

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

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but in the brake system.

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In conventional elevators, you have the brake

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

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now we have the brake directly on the cars.

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This new component, the exchanger,

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where we go from vertical
into horizontal movement,

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also needs to be checked by our safety controller.

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What is the position of the exchanger?

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Is it locked?

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Is it safe?

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And in case of any violation
of a safety rule,

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then we go to a 'safe state'.

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There are, of course, some catches.

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Linear induction motors are
expensive and heavy.

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

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And the whole elevator shaft,
from top to bottom,

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

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

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So will it work out in the real world?

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Thyssenkrupp's models say it will,

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but everything's been
tested and approved here,

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the next step is to sell it.

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To the kind of enormous multinational companies
who build skyscrapers

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and who do not like risk.

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

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

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