High rise buildings have used the same elevator system for X . So why mess with a safe matter ? Because that expert thing is one major waste of distance . Friends , it ’s time to redesign the lift .
The Problem
With only a few exception * , mellow rise construction apply lift designs that have n’t radically changed in decades . We place a individual lift hack into a prospicient vertical elevator jibe that extend either the full height of a construction or , in the causa of some very tall buildings , for a pocket-size percentage of the building ’s full meridian . This means that at any give meter , only one floor of an elevator slam is in use , while all of the remain floors are empty ( and must remain empty ) until the elevator cabriolet returns to or passes by the floor again . Put compactly , this is fundamentally wasteful .
To give the word some genuine numbers , let take a literal building . The John Hancock Centermakes an excellent model , as it is conveniently , precisely 100 floors tall and has a whopping 50 lift . lift shaft dimensions can vary considerably , but a fair size of it is 8×8 foot , or 64 square - feet . Now , not all elevator service all floors , so have ’s assume , just for statement ’s saki , that 17 elevator serve the first 33 floors , 17 serve the next floor ( 34 - 66 ) , and the remaining 16 serve the last floor ( 67 - 100 ) .
call back , even if an elevator only opens for some floors at the top of the edifice , all of the floors below are still fill with a shaft and the place is unuseable , even if there is no doorway . So , we have a totality of 17×33 + 17×66 + 100×16=3283 elevator place , and from above , we ’ve estimated that each lift space takes roughly 64ft^2 of outer space , which means our elevators occupy 3283×64 or just over 200,000 square - foot of floor space .

In the case of John Hancock , the integral building has 2.8 million satisfying - feet of usable floor area . So our elevator are approximately 7.5 percent of our usable distance . That is a lot of unused distance !
- Some construction , Like Tapei 101 , use double pack of cards elevator cabs , which help increase the capacity of a given elevator rotating shaft . Still these are more a pocket-size development than a revolutionary change .
So this is what we have now : every elevator running in its own shot , doing its own matter .

One Way to Fix It
I propose break the elevator quill paradigm by designing cable - less elevators machine that move in an elevator plane , instead of an lift line ( shaft ) . If an lift cab were able of moving laterally as well as vertically , we could run multiple elevator cars within a unmarried vertical column . To do this we ’d want to get free of lift cables and alternatively have each lift cab drive by an integral motor system . If we could run multiple lift cabs within a individual vertical chromatography column , we could radically reduce the identification number of required elevator shafts , freeing up substantial flooring space for other uses , including tenant occupancy .
fundamentally I propose something that ferment more like this :
So we ’ve gone from six elevator shafts to three . Of of course , we ca n’t switch to only two ray of light , as we need some ability to palm peak load — such as lunchtime or at the end of the day , when full floors of multitude all want to go away at rough the same time . But with multiple cab , we can combat capacitance issuance with high frequence , resulting in comparable or good full passenger throughput .

Fine - tuning would be required to determine the exact reduction in elevator shafts that could be accomplish , but a solid 50 percent reduction is certainly a sensible hypothesis . In the typeface of our example , this could mean freeing up 100,000 square - feet of additional tenant infinite , or 1,000 square - base per floor . In other words , about the sizing of a typical 2 - bedchamber , 2 - bath flat in the U.S.
Of course , this would all be wildly expensive and take some serious proficient hurdles to overcome — namely the increased energy needs that come from doing away with the traditional elevator counterweights . But hey — you have to start somewhere .
If you had a dream team of engineers and were given an outright budget and were secern to build something amazing ( it could be anything at all ) , what would you propose the squad build?originally appeared onQuora . you’re able to come after Quora onTwitter , Facebook , andGoogle+ .

This answer has been lightly blue-pencil for grammar and clarity .
Image : Shutterstock / Gl0ck
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