"Going Up" At 45 Mph: Hitachi To Deliver World's Fastest Elevator 109
Zothecula (1870348) writes "Hitachi has announced that it's installing the world's fastest ultra-high-speed elevators in the Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre skyscraper in Guangzhou, China. Making up two out of a total of 95 elevators in the building, Hitachi says the new lifts use a range of technologies to produce record-breaking speeds of 1,200 m/min while still meeting the necessary standards of safety and comfort."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think it would be cool to go 45mph from one floor to the next, provided the elevator is well padded.
Re:Express elevators (Score:4, Interesting)
For a 3m floor height, I find about 27.5G, at least.
45mph => 20.12 m.s^-1
a t_m = 20.12 m.s^-1
a t_m^2 = (3m / 2) (max acceleration obtained at half the floor height).
=> a = 20.12^2 / (3 / 2) \approx 270 m.s^-2 / or 27.5 earth G (G = 9.8 m.s^-2)
Where the limit of the human body for such vertical acceleration seems to be between 2,3G and 5G, depending if you are going up or down... but I haven't tested that myself).
Ok, back to work now...
Re: (Score:2)
No, no. Total travel distance is 440m, so it's 220m to max speed of 20m/sec. Assuming constant acceleration (which in practice you don't do because the startup jerk is awful) V=a*t, and d=0.5a*t^2.
d=220m, V=20m/sec.
V/a=t, so d=0.5*a*(V/a)^2
d=0.5*V^2/a
a=0.5*V^2/d
a=0.5*(20m/sec)^2/220m
a=200/220=0.91m/sec^2
1 g = 9.8m/sec^2
a=0.092 G
So it's about a tenth of a g. Riders are going to notice that, but it's not overwhelming.
This is a simplistic analysis. You have to keep jerk (the third derivative) sma
Re: (Score:2)
Some trouble with the 'Reply To This' function, I see...
Re: (Score:1)
No, no. They were talking about going from one floor to the next, which would only be about 3 m. I'm pretty sure they were joking, though.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
I see you are worried that the real engineers developing those things have to work with so called computer scientists and this can cause accelerating pedal problem like in Toyota? I think that is a fair question but I am sure this gets squeezed in next sprint so all will be well...
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Nope, you're off by a factor of two, I'm afraid. It should have been:
1/2 a t^2 = 3/2
t being the acceleration time (half the trip time), a the acceleration while going up, 3/2 the total distance while accelerating (half the trip), and a*t = 20.12
That works out to: a = 135 m/s^2 = 13.75g.
Which would be 14.75g while accelerating up, and 12.75g while decelerating, since you get 1g from just standing still.
If you want the same experienced g-force for acceleration and deceleration, it would be:
1/2 v^2 / (a+g) + 1
Re: (Score:1)
OK, with a bit of mathematica:
Accelerate with a "jerk" (derivative of acceleration) of 3620 m/s^3 for 0.07455 s to a top acceleration of 269.9 m/s^2, speed is 10.06 m/s at that time.
Keep accelerating, but with acceleration decreasing back to zero during the next 0.07455 s. Top speed is 20.12 m/s.
During the next 0.07455 s, deceleration increases from zero to 269.9 m/s^2, speed goes down to 10.06 m/s
During the last 0.07455 s, deceleration decreases to zero which is reached exactly as speed reaches zero.
Total
Re: (Score:2)
True!
Still a bad-ass acceleration though...
Re: (Score:2)
and you were the only occupant
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on who the other occupant is and how romantic you are about dying together.
Re: (Score:2)
...dying *crushed* together.
FTFY
Re: (Score:2)
Each passanger would have to be packed in metal armature, alternatively plasma armature can be used but that can leave some burns on the passanger. There may be some problems with structural integrity of load (liquidification) which can be bypassed by shock freezing (Han Solo).
Clearly you have never experienced an elevator ride in China. In some cases I'm sure that if passengers were to synchronize their breathing the ones in front would be crushed to death.
Put as many Gs as you want on that elevator, people won't move unless you put a coat of K-Y on the walls, in which case they will move as a team.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Express elevators (Score:4, Informative)
Some of these towers have an upper lobby. So you take the express from 1 to 75, then a 'local' from 76 to 100.
Usually the 'important people' are on the top floors so the elevator ratio is better and there's little waiting in the upper lobby. Unless you stop at the bar.
Once in a blue moon there's an express to the penthouse, but to pay for an entire express elevator entirely in the rent of the penthouse apartment isn't feasible for all but the ultra-ultra rich.
Re:Express elevators (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Express elevators-POP! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder how they avoid the popping. The article says that they use some kind of fancy pressurization system for that, but you still have to change altitude in a short amount of time, so how do you "avoid" that pressure change? You could pressurize the whole building, but then the windows couldn't open, you couldn't have a terrace (except if it had an ear-popping airlock), and there would be a constant strong draft from top to bottom unless you kept the floors sealed airtight (which is kind of hard to do if
Re: (Score:2)
I visited Taipei 101 a few months back, which has (IIRC) the fastest elevators in the world right now at about 35 MPH.
My ears popped three times. Each way.
So the answer is simple: they don't avoid the popping.
Expensive (Score:4, Informative)
High speed elevators are stupidly expensive.
I was looking at apartments a while back and at one of the buildings there was some ongoing construction.
Somehow I ended up getting shown around by one of the head contractors who told me that the building was supposed to have four medium speed elevators, but they got permission to knock it down to 3 high speed elevators, which would move the equivalent # of people per arbitrary unit of time.
The kicker was that those 3 elevators were about 1/4th the total budget of the entire building.
So based on that, I'm guessing that TFA's 95 elevators are a respectable portion of the price for that new tower in China.
Re:Expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with building really tall buildings is how to transport enough people up and down without using up the floor space on elevators rather than rentable area. Silly fast elevators may well be worth the money if it results in more silly expensive top-floor rent income.
Re:Expensive (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Stop calling it that.
It's the fucking Sears Tower, and always will be. Buying an iconic and historically important building DOES NOT give you the right to rename it. You can call it what you want, but the rest of the world can and should ignore you and laugh at your feeble attempt to rewrite history.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Expensive (Score:4, Funny)
The problem with building really tall buildings is how to transport enough people up and down without using up the floor space on elevators rather than rentable area. Silly fast elevators may well be worth the money if it results in more silly expensive top-floor rent income.
The west may have stopped with the prestige over practicality thing decades ago, but not in China.
Having the fastest elevators in the country, let alone the world is something to brag and bignote yourself about.
Why do you think they keep building stupidly expensive and impractical shit in Dubai (skyscrapers, artificial island and so forth), it's so the Emir's can have a huge wank.
Re: (Score:2)
That would interesting to see: a troll complaining his way up 95 flights of stairs. I'll point out that these high speed elevators are made by Hitachi, a Japanese company.
Re: (Score:1)
We need turbolifts, like in Star Trek so they can move out of the way of each other. Alternately, we could have elevators that "prefer" certain routes depending on where they and the other elevators or at. Alternately again, we could have elevators that collapse on themselves if no one in is in it, which could be kind of creepy for first time users.
Personally, I think elevators in tall buildings should move in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction, then they don't interfere with each other quite as mu
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like something which would definitely allow higher passenger capacity for a given amount of shaft space.
Re: (Score:1)
If you read the article you referred to....
>> In April 2006, Hitachi announced plans for a modern paternoster-style elevator with computer-controlled cars and normal elevator doors to alleviate safety concerns.[7][8] A prototype has been revealed as of February 2013.[9] .... you wouldn't of had to post.
(Here's #9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com])
Re: (Score:2)
Fast elevators are also good R&D projects, with the technology filtering down to standard models and keeping them competitive. Car manufacturers do that all the time.
Japanese companies do this sort of thing a lot, and it's a very different attitude to the typical western one. I was telling a friend about vending machines that have been deployed in Japan for a few years now where the front is basically a giant 50" TV touch screen. There is a camera that uses facial feature recognition to estimate your ag
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, it may be kind of elaborate, but if it can serve as an advertising platform in a busy station that function of it may pay for the machine over the life of it.
Re: (Score:2)
Only 2 of the 95 elevators are going to be the super-high-speed models. The others are going to be the regular cheaper kind it would seem (not that an elevator is ever cheap to build or maintain regardless of speed)
is that all? (Score:2)
45mph doesn't actually sound very fast to me, especially going down.
Re: (Score:2)
It's plenty fast, almost 4000ft/minute. In a commercial airliner that descent rate would only be used in an emergency,
Re: (Score:2)
It's higher than residential speed limit, which is usually something like 30 mph or 50 km/h. My highest speed on a bicycle (downhill) was some 65 km/h (scary fast when cornering), compared to the 72 km/h of the elevators.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not "fast", but in an elevator, the problem is not speed, it's air pressure. In an airplane that's pressurized, the cabin air pressure is set to achieve an approximate 500'/minute descent (the actual aircraft will be descending far faster than this) as this keeps passengers comfortable. Go faster and passenger's ears pop and they get mighty uncomfortable. Too fast and you can pop and eardrum.
That's the fundamental limit on the speed o
Re: (Score:2)
The pressure changes come from the lift moving in the shaft, not from the altitude changes like on a aircraft since the difference in air pressure between 0 and 1000 feet for example is pretty negligable. All they need to do to solve the pressure problem is seal the lift car better.
Re: (Score:1)
No, the pressure changes definitely comes from the change in altitude, the motion of the lift in the shaft has little to do with it. There may be a slightly higher pressure on one side of the cage and a slightly lower pressure on the other side, but there will be vents to reduce that effect and it won't translate in a difference in pressure inside the cage.
The difference between sea level and 1000 ft is far from negligible, though. Its about 30 hPa (300 kgf/m^2)
Airliners are usually limited to a pressure ch
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm afraid it is pretty negligable as far as the human ear is concerned. Just 10m of water is equivalent of 1 atmosphere pressure and plenty of divers - even free divers - can dive that in under a minute with no issues with their ears so long as they're careful. Thats the equivalent of going from space down to sea level.
Re: (Score:1)
Tell that to all the crying babies in airplanes or in mountain cable cars. Or to those adults unfortunate enough to burst their eardrums when flying with a serious cold. The 8000 ft of pressure difference between cabin pressure at cruising altitude and on the ground can sometimes be enough to rupture them if air cannot get into the inner ear through the blocked eustachian tube. Of course that's eight times as much as the difference between 0 and 1000 ft, but even that is very noticeable if the change happen
Re: (Score:2)
Oh come on - this building is 500m high. According to this:
http://www.altitude.org/air_pr... [altitude.org]
the pressure difference between bottom and top is 5 KPA. Thats equivalent to 50m of water - a deep bath. Its nothing. You'd barely even noticed it much less be troubled by it.
Anyway altitude change doesn't explain the rise in pressure of a train travelling in a tunnel an its the same effect for a high speed lift. Its compressing the air in the direction of movement in a confined space.
Re: (Score:1)
When you hold your head under water, even 50 cm (that's a pretty deep bath), you do feel some pressure on your eardrums. Certainly not enough to damage them, but you will clearly feel it and a lot of people find this unconfortable.
A train going into a tunnel at high speed (much faster than an elevator) does indeed cause a bit of a pressure increase because the air only has one way to go, though I doubt it's even as much as your 50 cm of water. And an elevator shaft normally has plenty of vents to let the ex
So how many g's? (Score:2)
I RTFA, and all it says is 440 meters in 43 seconds. I'd like to know the acceleration profile for this thing, it sounds like fun!
How does an elevator accelerate? (Score:1)
What does the acceleration vs time graph for an elevator look like, before it's reached 'cruising' speed?
If the elevator accelerated at a constant rate, I found that its acceleration would only be ~1.99m/s^2 or 0.2g's. I used the fact that it travels 440 meters in 43 seconds and its cruising speed will be 20m/s (all taken from TFA). According to those numbers, it would accelerate for the first 21 seconds, cruise for 1 second, and then decelerate for the last 21 seconds.
Re: (Score:2)
I like the idea of just freefalling for most of the way and then slowly and safely decelerating. That would be a riot.
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking that, too. They could install a second cable, tying the bottom of the elevator to the bottom of the counterweights and looping it through a pulley at the bottom of the shaft. That way they could fully control acceleration unbounded by gravity. They could accelerate the elevator slightly faster than the speed of gravity for the first fraction of a second, leaving the occupants floating about the cabin in mid-air, and then match the acceleration of gravity until it's at the end of the free-f
Barrotrauma (Score:2)
There's going to be lots of crying babies!
Re: (Score:2)
Hell, I had an air bubble underneath a filling in a tooth... going up or down hill too fast was... painful.
Hmm. (Score:5, Interesting)
I want my high speed elevator to descend at a rate *just* fast enough to have me hovering six inches off the floor, which should be made of glass.
Re: (Score:2)
The elevator would have to accelerate at the rate of gravity (9.8 m/s/s, iirc) and have a cruising speed as fast as terminal velocity for you.
Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since terminal velocity is a function of air resistance, but the air in the elevator is always moving as fast as the occupant, there's actually no upper limit on the speed of the elevator. It would have to accelerate the entire way.
falling vs powered... Re:Hmm. (Score:2)
I suppose the descent could be powered... that would work pretty well, at least once.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking it would slow down just enough to get my feet on the ground, then decelerate hard. Obviously free fall to a dead stop would suck. ;)
Seems a bit pointless (Score:2)
This building is only 530m high. Even at a 30mph you could do that in about 20 seconds and thats assuming you're going all the way from the bottom to the top. For that distance this lift would save around a whole 5-6 seconds (not counting acceleration time). BFD.
Sounds like an expensive technology showcase rather than something that will be a major extra benefit.
Re: (Score:2)
If you were comparing constant 30 mph to 45 mph, sure, but us puny humans need to be gently accelerated to and from such speeds, which account for a significant portion of the time - you can't just wave it away.
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. Plenty of cars can manage 0-30 in under 3 seconds. I don't think anyones been hospitalised because of the accelerative forces involved yet. And plenty of motorbikes can do 60 in the same time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This building is only 530m high. Even at a 30mph you could do that in about 20 seconds and thats assuming you're going all the way from the bottom to the top. For that distance this lift would save around a whole 5-6 seconds (not counting acceleration time). BFD.
Sounds like an expensive technology showcase rather than something that will be a major extra benefit.
The point of this elevator isn't to save you or I a couple of seconds on our trip. It's undoubtedly the increase the throughput on the elevator itself so that it can service more users in a day. This will allow them to save space on an extra bank of elevator shafts. At least, that is what I would expect. That is a real concern. Elevators just waste space - they don't make any money for the property owner. But your property is worthless without adequate lifts.
Re: (Score:2)
The point of this elevator isn't to save you or I a couple of seconds on our trip. It's undoubtedly the increase the throughput on the elevator itself so that it can service more users in a day.
Kind of like a whore house in Nevada?
Turbo-Lifts? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
The alternative angle (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like a really slow, large elevator containing a restaurant or a bar. Have dinner or get pissed on the way home! Perfect.
The problem, of course, is that instead of the restaurant taking up space on one floor of the building, it would then occupy a restaurant-sized hole in every floor of the building. (Yes, this could be partially offset by stacking several floors of restaurant in this hypothetical elevator shaft, but you're still wasting many multiples of the restaurant's floor area in the building. And floor area in high-rise towers isn't cheap.) We'll leave aside the challenges of providing working utility connections,
Re: (Score:2)
I once managed to briefly convince someone that the bulb bit of the CN Tower actually moved up and down like an elevator.
Re: (Score:1)
Physics (Score:2)
As long as it doesn't accelerate faster than ~9m/sec, your feet don't leave the ground.
Re: (Score:2)
... must come down.
Tell that to the voyager probes.
Will this elevator provide foot locks such that people will not 'leave' the floor when it's descending at ~72kmph?
And how are they getting around the queasy sensation you'll most probably feel?
Also. I think you underestimate just how fast you need to accelerate to lave the ground. Lets just say it's more than 9 meters per second squared.
Will it be pressurized? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Won't that simply delay the ear popping issue until the doors open at the top floor, and make it worse since its all at once? You would have to pressurize the entire building for that to work.
Re: (Score:2)
Too Fast (Score:2)
No time for love in an elevator.
public infrastructure innovation is not in the US (Score:5, Interesting)
If you've ever gone to Taipei 101 for example, the elevators move so quickly, and without any vibration as they go up/down that you almost cannot tell if they're moving. Go to Singapore or Hong Kong, and watch how smoothly, quietly, and punctually their subway systems run.
Or go to China and be surprised that in even small-sized cities, you didn't realize that *all* their motorcycles are now electric and they leap-frogged the smelly gasoline phase of motorbike technology.
You come back to the US, and wonder how we're still (maybe) #1, with our rickety buildings and public transport systems. It's embarrassing. And people will say, well, "Who needs quieter, smoother subways? What we have is fine." Said while yelling because you have to cover your ears to not go deaf on the F train in New York City. And as you have to hold your nose as you walk through the piss-soaked, dark and dingy subway/bus station concourses.
Sometimes I feel like we're witnessing the slow decline of American technology / investment when it comes to public infrastructure.
No thanks (Score:3)
And they're calling it... (Score:1)