New Maglev Elevator Can Travel Horizontally, Vertically, and Diagonally (wired.co.uk) 213
An elevator that can move in any direction has been successfully tested by a German company named ThyssenKrupp. An anonymous reader quotes Wired UK:
The Multi is the first ropeless lift, built using the same magnetic levitation technology used in Japan's bullet train and proposed for the Hyperloop. In the same way the train slides along a track horizontally, the lift travels both vertically, horizontally and diagonally around a building riding an electromagnetic field, a system known as a linear drive. "If you can run a 500-tonne train on magnets at 500km/h you should be able to elevate a cabin of 500 kilograms or 1,000 kilograms at a speed of five metres per second," [ThyssenKrupp CEO Andreas] Schierenbeck said.
The elevator can cost 3 to 5 times more than a regular elevator -- but can handle higher buildings than a conventional elevator.
The elevator can cost 3 to 5 times more than a regular elevator -- but can handle higher buildings than a conventional elevator.
Turbolift (Score:4, Funny)
Next week on slashdot: phased energy weapons to be made available to security forces worldwide
Bit by bit, we're catching up with Star Wars technology.
Re:Turbolift (Score:5, Insightful)
You totally made that mistake on purpose...
Re:Turbolift (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah. I pressed submit and leaned back in my chair with an evil grin on my face. Someone will track me down and bludgeon me to death for it, but it was worth it.
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Some people just want to watch the world burn...
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Surely you mean they'll use the Dalek Galactica from the Peacekeepers.
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phased energy weapons to be made available
Bit by bit
So...it's a phased deployment?
A German company named ThyssenKrupp (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying an American company named General Electric.
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Yeah, I immediately thought this must either have been written by a serious ignoramus, or someone with a beef with Germany in general. Using the Japanese "bullet train" (which isn't maglev) or the mostly vaporware Hyperloop as examples of maglev, instead of the German Transrapid, which is in fact still the only production maglev train in the world is pretty pathetic.
Re: A German company named ThyssenKrupp (Score:5, Informative)
One of Largest Global Elevator Builders (Score:2)
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Colonel Panic? (Score:2)
Admiral Appliance?
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Wonkavator (Score:2, Informative)
NT
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Only if it has a button "up and out". That works.
(and, powered by candy?)
But will the doors go "shhh!" when they traverse? (Score:5, Funny)
Capt Kirk, Capt. James T. Kirk, you're wanted at Turbolift 1.
Re:But will the doors go "shhh!" when they travers (Score:5, Informative)
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Nah, it's clearly the inferior Star Trek version. Can't go squareways.
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Came for the Star Trek reference. Was not disappointed. Thanks.
Nice work, Mr Musk (Score:3, Funny)
Wait, what? Elon Musk isn't involved? But.......how is that even possible? Everyone knows Musk is the world's only living inventor!
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You're not thinking creatively enough.
Maybe because there is no hallway to walk. With this kind of elevators, hallways full of doors can be a thing of the past - the elevator just drops you off at your destination.
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So why not just walk?
You're not thinking creatively enough.
Maybe because there is no hallway to walk. With this kind of elevators, hallways full of doors can be a thing of the past - the elevator just drops you off at your destination.
Speaking of creative thinking, I can't wait to see the emergency-exit plan for insanely high buildings with no hallways or doors.
I mean after all, electricity, elevators, escalators; these are things that have never failed...
Re:Nice work, Mr Musk (Score:5, Interesting)
Rocket-powered, parachute-equipped escape pods.
Never pass up a chance to rocket-power something.
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I can't wait to see the emergency-exit plan for insanely high buildings with no hallways or doors.
Rocket-powered, parachute-equipped escape pods.
Never pass up a chance to rocket-power something.
Actually, I was thinking personal drones, but you may be on to something with rocket-powered drones...
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Did you see the video? The elevator's horizontal speed was around the same speed as walking. So why not just walk?
We live in a world where humans expend the additional effort to type text messages instead of simply speaking to each other in order to communicate, and yet are too lazy to get up and turn off a light switch, or open a browser to search for something, insisting that a voice-controlled in-home digital assistant needs to do that instead.
Logic knows no bounds.
Re:Nice work, Mr Musk (Score:5, Interesting)
With a conventional elevator, you're correct about the "it reserves an entire shaft" concept. That's inherent with presence of either the cable, or hydraulic cylinder. Why would that limitation exist with a maglev elevator? There's no need for one elevator car per shaft. I think 4 shafts would work nicely: Up, Down, Ready, Waiting. And only the Ready shaft has a door accessible to the public. You press the call button and the usual case is the door will open immediately since there's already a car waiting there. After you select your floor, that car moves a short distance towards either the Up or Down shaft and proceeds on your journey. Meanwhile, a nearby car in the Waiting shaft starts its own journey to replace the car you just took. As your car approaches your destination, the car already there starts its own journey to a Waiting Shaft slot to make room for your car.
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Please let them call it... (Score:5, Insightful)
The WONKAVATOR
PLEASE.
Turbolift (Score:2)
They should call it a Turbolift. Yes, as in Star Trek. Just don't give it an AI, please.
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They should call it a Turbolift. Yes, as in Star Trek. Just don't give it an AI, please.
Up your shaft.
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No need to. He's trapped in the holodeck and doesn't know it.
Top-down design (Score:5, Interesting)
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With this tech the elevators become cars on a vertical railway and can take on passengers without blocking shafts. Big gain.
If you don't mind having to get off at one floor to transfer to another lift to get to the top floor since I doubt the system would allow the bottom car to go to the top floor unless you used that sideways feature to shunt cars out of the way.
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The cost of the elevator is the floor space (Score:5, Interesting)
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On a 50 floor building an elevator 4'x6' will have a shaft a little larger plus a 10' waiting area in front of it, so say 15x8 or 120 feet square x 50 floors gives 6000 square feet. Times $1000 per square foot for grade A office space and your elevator is now taking up $6 million dollars worth of floor space.
From TFS:
"The elevator can cost 3 to 5 times more than a regular elevator -- but can handle higher buildings than a conventional elevator."
Ever consider the millions wasted per year in business efficiency with a building full of employees who are forced to walk due to traditional designs?
The efficiency gains also include traditional vertical movement too, since maglev speeds are likely going to only be restricted by human capability. I for one, vote for an elevator ride from the 75th floor that includes a free-fall mode to simulate weightlessness for a few seconds, with careful deceleration. Would be one hell of an attraction to w
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I for one, vote for an elevator ride from the 75th floor that includes a free-fall mode to simulate weightlessness for a few seconds, with careful deceleration. Would be one hell of an attraction to work there.
Especially fun when you bring down a cart full of anvils with you.
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You'd want to hack the elevator, get it going maximum speed up at the start of the free fall period, for maximum duration.
Still wouldn't be long enough for sex. Maybe a set of elastic trapeze like position restraints, a deep, soft landing surface and a 'bounce hack'. If you could overpower the motors, get it to 30m/sec up. That's six seconds of zero-G per cycle. Getting crushed by 2 Gs, about half time, would have be worked into the rhythm. Extreme care would be needed, focus too.
And the most interesting feature... (Score:5, Interesting)
Was not even mentioned in the summary. You can run multiple cabins in the same shaft, saving precious floor space (and move the cabins horizontally if they need to pass each other, or you can just assign up and down shafts). Thus, for larger buildings this type of elevator can actually be a major cost saver.
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Was not even mentioned in the summary. You can run multiple cabins in the same shaft, saving precious floor space (and move the cabins horizontally if they need to pass each other, or you can just assign up and down shafts). Thus, for larger buildings this type of elevator can actually be a major cost saver.
Just assigning up and down shafts would lose another important feature: the ability to load an elevator car at one floor and send it directly to the destination floor with no stops. That not only minimizes wait time for the people in the car, but also minimizes the time until the car is available again, increasing throughput.
Ideally, the elevator system needs to know how many people are waiting at each floor, and their destination floors. I've seen one elevator system, in Google's DeepMind office in Londo
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Imagine, an up shaft and a down shaft connected ladder style so the loading / unloading area is in the connecting tunnels. The car pulls in, loads/unloads while the other cars go up or down around it.
This would already cut the amount of floor space required by half in the tower I used to work in It had 21 floors and 6 elevators not counting the ones that went to the basement. A system like that could cut the floor space used to half, while still being faster.
As an added bonus, you could put more loading/un
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Imagine, an up shaft and a down shaft connected ladder style so the loading / unloading area is in the connecting tunnels. The car pulls in, loads/unloads while the other cars go up or down around it.
Very nice! Clearly, yes, this is the way to do it. In fact it's blindingly obvious :-)
Plus in very tall buildings some additional shafts for "express" trips should be used so that elevators don't have to slow down for others that are stopping to enter the pickup area.
Re: The cost of the elevator is the floor space (Score:2)
Yet without it, the office space is classed Grade Z (except the first floor).
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If you're talking a 50-story building of grade A office space, you're not going to have just one elevator shaft. You'll have banks of elevators, potentially as many as 30 [quora.com], simply because you're limited to one car per shaft. Using your math, 30 elevators would mean 180,000 sqft of floor space (i.e. $180,000,000 at $1000/sqft).
With this new technology, the limit of one car per shaft is broken.
Suddenly, you can replace those 30 shafts with just four: one to go up, one to go down, one for entry and exit, and on
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I could see where an elevator capable of both sideways and vertical movement could have some benefit in a building with a large horizontal footprint. I could see it used as a combination of lift and sort of shuttle train in a large, flat building.
It might add flexibility in floor plans where a tenant wanted floor space without a central shaft breaking up the space.
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The primary benefit is not the sideways thing.
Conventional lifts have a limit to the amount of vertical distance they can cover before various factors like the weight of the cable required make them impractical. So you end up having multiple shafts, both because you can only have a single car per shaft, and hence need more shafts to cope with the passenger load, and because you need different type of lift, local ones for the lower portion, and express ones to take you quickly up to the next lot that service the upper portion of the building.
Put one of these in, and you've probably just saved a huge chunk of space that you can now charge for.
The article says this costs 3-5 times a normal elevator system, but in a typical downtown skyscraper the space savings are expected to more than compensate for the cost.
Add to that the time saved by having multiple lifts per shaft
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I could imagine that the sideways thing could be the main benefit.
Imagine a ten story building with two lift shafts and 10 cars. In a quiescent state there's one car parked on each floor.
During light times, someone gets into a lift, the cars above or below move out of the way and then it travels to the required floor. The cars it has passed simultaneously shuffle up or down one floor and you're back to the quiescent state. In busy times there can be one up and o
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Imagine a ten story building with two lift shafts and 10 cars.
Cool scenario, but overkill (pending simulation results :-) ) Take your idea with just 4 cars, which should get a large amount of the improvement (over the current 2 cars in two lift shafts). 10 cars means they spend a lot of energy getting out of the way all the time. And usage patterns would vary quite a bit; in a residence, where most trips are from home to lobby (or basement for wash/garbage), moving out of the way is a common activity, while an office building with trips between floors might well g
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I was thinking more that the parked cars would not be *in* the shaft.
So to take your overkill example of 10 cars, 2 shafts. I'll assume that each floor has a 'station' in the middle of the shafts, where the cars actually go to load/unload.
If only one car gets used, then the passenger boards, it shifts right into the right shaft, at the same time the car on the target floor shifts to the left shaft to do a swap. The other 8 cars stay stationary at their stations throughout the whole thing.
This also means l
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Someone is using a new flavor in their coffee.
Please (Score:2)
Please let some kid named Charlie be the first to ride in it.
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Actually, assuming this actually gets implemented somewhere (no doubt in some phallic monument to excess), I can well imagine that the owners of the building would do a Willy Wonka themed "Golden Ticket" competition to select some people for an all expenses paid trip to their opening night. Pretty obvious PR move for your new building as, while those who win are unlikely to care much beyond t
Maglev Elevator? I don't think so. (Score:2)
simple controller override (Score:2)
Sounds like a bloody giant goddamn space gun in disguise to me.
Probably could do double duty in some sort of civil defense program to drive off any aliens that attempt to molest the Earth.
Add AI and you will get H2G2 elevators (Score:2)
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This would explain the oft-repeated adage: "A stiff dick has no brain."
Bullet Train? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Experience with "smart" elevators (Score:3)
I have been in reserve-your-floor elevators and 2-cars-per-shaft elevators. I am not looking forward to the Wonkavator, unless they make it extremely human-friendly. It sounds cool but...
The reserve-your-floor elevator would require floor selection by a keypad exterior to the cabin. It would refuse to accept other floor number entry from within the cabin, which is disconcerting if you just jump into a waiting cabin without entering a selection first. These were universally hated. The idea is the elevator is smarter than you and maximizes traffic but really it just was aggravating to anyone not used to it. (Customers and new employees)
The 2-cars-per-shaft elevator would stop and everyone would look uncomfortably at each other in a progressively claustrophobic space. Also your ears would tend to pop from the height.
I would feel a little better about 3D elevators if they would be guaranteed never to stop except in front of a door, and could be exited at any time if someone feels sick. If you tried to exit in an emergency would you be stuck in the middle of high voltage / EMF / mega-robot gears? The image of the exchanger gear is near from an engineering perspective in the way a funicular or trolley gear is, but you don't want to be climbing over one of those things. (maybe subject of a future James Bond movie?) If hacked you could literally lose people somewhere in a building. It brings so many potential neuroses I am not sure people will want to ride them. On the other hand for a factory they would be very cool.
Not the first (Score:3)
Ditch the cable. Already being tried (Score:2)
They are experimenting with two adjacent shafts, one up and the other down. Cars move horizontally to transfer from on shaft to another at the top floor and the basement.
They are also moving the floor request button outside the car. Thus if three cars are going up, there is one request for floor A from
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I believe Otis actually has a design for a system that uses linear induction motors & tracks for vertical and horizontal travel, but ALSO has the ability to grab onto one or more counterweighted cables for part or all of a trip (so they still get the partial benefit of counterweights). So an upward-bound elevator could grab onto a cable with a counterweight near the top of the building, then let go of the counterweight (which would then anchor itself in place until the next elevator grabbed onto it) if
Cool. (Score:2)
Can't wait to say this... (Score:2)
"Bridge!"
I assume these will be voice controlled, after all.
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Seriously? Do you think that wouldn't happen with conventional elevators if they had no emergency braking system?
Re:Turn the power off (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Turn the power off (Score:5, Informative)
No, not really. The ones with cables have a counterweight, so they tend to stay put, unless the cable snaps - that's when you need emergency brakes. The hydraulic ones will descend if there is a leak or power fail, but still at a relatively safe pace.
There's more than one emergency break system on elevators. One is a wheel break on the pulley, which engages in the case of power loss (or in normal operation, while elevator is at a floor).
The other is the track break, which engages in the event where the rope snaps (clamps on the cabin that seize the metal tracks that guide the cabin).
Both would be difficult to put in place on a Maglev system.
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Not really. Look at the Vancouver Skytrain or any other linear motor system in use. When the train stops, it puts wheels down and brakes.
The thing I'd be worried about here is the brakes failing due to weight restrictions being ignored, and that would be easily solved by having the elevator detect brake stress and automatically go out of service.
Re:Turn the power off (Score:5, Informative)
The thing I'd be worried about here is the brakes failing due to weight restrictions being ignored
Elevator brakes are way over engineered. They can handle way more weight than could possibly be crammed into the cab. Brakes can be designed so they require power to retract, so automatically engage in a power-failure. Elevator brakes are also designed to automatically trip if speed thresholds are exceeded, and the tripping mechanism is purely mechanical, requiring no power.
Quibble about TFS: The Japanese Shinkansen are not maglev. They run on wheels.
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Battery packs and recharging when stationary. Or you could use that powerful maglev field for some inductive charging.
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It depends on the type of maglev technology used. The Japanese trains have wheels that come down when they stop, but in an emergency where there is sudden power loss they wouldn't just drop down instantly anyway. Other types use permanent magnets which provide levitation even when not moving, and only use electrical current to move.
In any case, I can't see a problem adding brakes to a maglev lift. It just needs suitable guide rails.
Re:Turn the power off (Score:5, Informative)
The maglev part is kind of a misnomer. It's not using magnetic levitation, per se, but rather using linear motors to move around. Yes, maglev trains use that technology to travel, but so do a number of launched roller coasters [wikipedia.org] out there. Any it's being used as a replacement for the steam catapult [wikipedia.org] in the latest U.S. aircraft carrier.
The elevator car is still in contact with a track, for mechanical and electrical reasons. It almost certainly has track brakes that require energy to release. That is, in the event of power loss, they are spring-loaded to engage automatically.
Additionally, since we are talking about a motor, you can do dynamic braking: short the stator windings together, and the back-emf created by the passing magnets will create a substantial drag force. Want to try at home? Drop a neodymium magnet down a copper pipe and see how long it takes. Or take an ordinary DC motor, short the leads together, then try to backdrive it.
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The other is the track break, which engages in the event where the rope snaps (clamps on the cabin that seize the metal tracks that guide the cabin).
Both would be difficult to put in place on a Maglev system.
I was thinking about this type while reading the article. I think it can be done quite simply. Just make the car two parts. The inner part holds the passengers, and the outer part (carrier) has the maglev equipment. Basically, the carrier takes the place of the cable. In the event of a maglev failure, the force between the two components will be zero, and the clamps would activate.
My question is, what happens when the car stops at a floor. Is it held in place mechanically? Is a magnetic field holdi
Re:Turn the power off (Score:5, Informative)
No, not really. The ones with cables have a counterweight, so they tend to stay put, unless the cable snaps - that's when you need emergency brakes. The hydraulic ones will descend if there is a leak or power fail, but still at a relatively safe pace.
A lift engineer told me that the counterweight is usually set for somewhere near half the maximum load to minimise energy use, so if all power and the brakes fail you will go up if you are alone in the lift or down if you are in a fully loaded lift. He said that modern lifts are built so that if this does occur it is survivable without injury by having a either buffer or fixed slides at the bottom of the shaft, and having either the same at the top or enough "jump space" for the lift car to continue once the counterweight hits the bottom until gravity makes it fall back against the cables. I imagine that must be scary.
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Seriously? Do you think that wouldn't happen with conventional elevators if they had no emergency braking system?
Exactly. ... but how would you install an emergency breaking system on a (contactless!) Maglev system without seriously restricting the the directions in which this can move? (diagonally...)
Maybe they do have a solution, but the article is entirely silent on the subject...
Re:Turn the power off (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Turn the power off (Score:2)
I am kinda curious why they thought the engineers had overlooked safety. It's kinda silly to think they hadn't actually, you know, thought about gravity. Kids today...
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Yah, you can either just short out the end turns on a three phase linear synchronous motor and get drag proportional to speed or you can have a secondary set of magnets dragging past aluminium fins, or likely both. Both surprisingly effective braking methods, and not magic.
to try at home, get a NeFeB magnet, a half inch aluminum plate, and try to move one past the other.
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Exactly. ... but how would you install an emergency breaking system on a (contactless!) Maglev system without seriously restricting the the directions in which this can move? (diagonally...)
Contactless is not the same thing as impossible to make contact. It will ride in close proximity to the magnets/rails. Wouldn't be hard to come up with a system that would physically engage in the event of a problem.
Re:Turn the power off (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, if you have permanent magnets on the track, you could make an eddy current brake just by moving a big piece of metal in close proximity. This piece of metal could be spring loaded to automatically return to the braking position when power goes out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Turn the power off (Score:2)
Exactly. In the simplest version of this, the brakes can be spring loaded such that power is required to keep them off the track. If the power cuts, the springs force the brakes into the rail and halts the elevator.
Air brake systems on large trucks work this way, except instead of electricity keeping the emergency ("spring") brake disengaged, its compressed air. If there's ever a catastrophic loss of air pressure (drops below about 30 psi), the spring brake pops on and locks the wheels.
Re:Turn the power off (Score:4, Informative)
If you look at the actual product, it doesn't move freely in space, it is on a track. There is a rotating section of track like a railroad turntable that allows it to switch tracks.
That is where all of the hyperbole about "any direction, even diagonally" comes from. The thing moves on a track. Having the ability to switch tracks means you can have multiple cars in each elevator shaft, and cars can potentially pass one another.
Since they are installing one of these things in an actual commercial building under construction in Germany, I'm sure they have an emergency braking system.
Looking at the track, it doesn't appear as if it is a "contactless" maglev system. It looks like it is running on some sort of track and using a linear electric motor for propulsion. This means that they could simply use an inertial braking system like regular elevators - if the car goes too fast, braking weights fly out and stop the car.
Re:Turn the power off (Score:5, Interesting)
Because of the shoddy writing in the article and the summary, I can understand why you would think it's contactless. But it isn't. The similarity with maglev trains and the hyperloop is the fact that it uses a linear motor to move along the track. The elevator car is still affixed to a track/rail and does not levitate. When it needs to go sideways, it does so at specially located switchpoints where it traverses a horizontal track. This would be obvious from reading the articles or, for the short-attention-spanned, watching the embedded videos.
Re:Turn the power off (Score:5, Insightful)
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Having a continuous-loop system, while it would allow you to put more cars in the loop, is vulnerable to a single-point-of-failure attack; jamming one car's door open piles up every car in the loop behind that one; doing that with a conventional elevator bank disables only that one elevator. To a lesser degree, this could happen under normal use simply by having people being slow getting on and off, or by having someone hold the 'door open' button to allow someone to keep the elevator on a floor to allow so
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Having a continuous-loop system, while it would allow you to put more cars in the loop, is vulnerable to a single-point-of-failure attack; jamming one car's door open piles up every car in the loop behind that one; doing that with a conventional elevator bank disables only that one elevator.
This is an improvement over paternoster lifts: the cars aren't tied together and, since they can move in more than one direction, it's possible to have places where they can move to one side to pass each other as you see on single lane country roads.
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What about power use? (Score:3)
Safety considerations aside - with a normal lift the motor only has to work against cabin weight - counter weight. Even hydraulic lifts can build up pressure when the cabin is descdneing. WIth this design the linear motor has to do all the work lifting the cabin up so unless there's some sort of regenerative braking system when it comes down this is going to be horribly power hungry and inefficient just when buildings are being required to reduce their power usage.
Seriously... (Score:2)
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Which Wonka? There are two Wonka organizations: the Dahl estate and Nestlé.
(In-universe, they'd be seen as Wonka's biographer and the company that bought the company that bought the candy company from the Buckets, respectively.)
just in time angst on demand (Score:2)
Then they can go sulk in the basement.
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