Elevator

They are typically powered by electric motors that drive traction cables and counterweight systems such as a hoist, although some pump hydraulic fluid to raise a cylindrical piston like a jack.

[4] In 1000, the Book of Secrets by Ibn Khalaf al-Muradi in Islamic Spain described the use of an elevator-like lifting device to raise a large battering ram to destroy a fortress.

The first screw-drive elevator was built by Ivan Kulibin and installed in the Winter Palace in 1793, although there may have been an earlier design by Leonardo da Vinci.

A safety system was designed to take effect if the cords broke, consisting of a beam pushed outwards by a steel spring.

It constructed a network of high-pressure mains on both sides of the Thames which ultimately extended 184 miles (296 km) and powered some 8,000 machines, predominantly elevators and cranes.

The Toshiba company continued research on thyristors for use in inverter control and dramatically enhanced their switching capacity, resulting in the development of insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) at the end of the 1980s.

The IGBT realized increased switching frequency and reduced magnetic noise in the motor, eliminating the need for a filter circuit and allowing a more compact system.

In a "traction" elevator, cars are pulled up by means of rolling steel ropes over a deeply grooved pulley, commonly called a sheave in the industry.

There are economies to be made from mass production of the components, but each building comes with its own requirements like different number of floors, dimensions of the well and usage patterns.

[35] The summation of his work was a massive fold-out chart (placed at the back of his book) that allowed users to determine the number of express and local elevators needed for a given building to meet a desired interval of service.

[36] He followed Bolton's lead and developed a "Chart for determining the number and size of elevators required for office buildings of a given total occupied floor area".

At the first Elevator and Escalator symposium in 2011, Al-Sharif proposed an alternative form of simulation[48] that modeled a car's single round trip before restarting and running again.

But it can also be some form of disc type like one or more calipers over a disc in one end of the motor shaft or drive sheave which is used in high speed, high rise and large capacity elevators with machine rooms (an exception is the Kone MonoSpace's EcoDisc which is not high speed, high rise and large capacity and is machine room less but it uses the same design as is a thinner version of a conventional gearless traction machine) for braking power, compactness and redundancy (assuming there are at least two calipers on the disc), or one or more disc brakes with a single caliper at one end of the motor shaft or drive sheave which is used in machine room less elevators for compactness, braking power, and redundancy (assuming there are two or more brakes).

Another energy-saving improvement is the regenerative drive,[52] which works analogously to regenerative braking in vehicles, using the elevator's electric motor as a generator to capture some of the gravitational potential energy of descent of a full cab (heavier than its counterweight) or ascent of an empty cab (lighter than its counterweight) and return it to the building's electrical system.

Climbing elevators are used in guyed masts or towers, in order to make easy access to parts of these constructions, such as flight safety lamps for maintenance.

In taller buildings with high traffic, such as the New York Marriott Marquis or the Burj Khalifa, the destination dispatch algorithm is used to group passengers going to similar floors, maximizing load by up to 25%.

Some skyscraper buildings and other types of installation feature a destination operating panel where a passenger registers their floor calls before entering the car.

The doors then close after an adjustable time period and the car remains unusable until reset, usually by cycling the elevator main power switch.

Typically, due to the high current draw when starting the pump motor, hydraulic elevators are not run using standard emergency power systems.

For example, there is a three-station underground public elevator in Yalta, Ukraine, which takes passengers from the top of a hill above the Black Sea on which hotels are perched, to a tunnel located on the beach below.

Passenger elevators may be specialized for the service they perform, including: hospital emergency (code blue), front and rear entrances, a television in high-rise buildings, double-decker, and other uses.

There is a barrel on the background of the image of the left which can be used as a scale to represent the size of the mechanism Vehicular elevators are used within buildings or areas with limited space (in place of ramps), generally to move cars into the parking garage or manufacturer's storage.

Construction may be less robust than in commercial designs with shorter maintenance periods, but safety systems such as locks on shaft access doors, fall arrestors, and emergency phones must still be present in the event of malfunction.

A similar concept, called the manlift or humanlift, moves only a small platform, which the rider mounts while using a handhold seen in multi-story industrial plants.

When Nicholas II of Russia visited the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, his courtiers panicked about who would enter the elevator first, and who would press the buttons.

Israeli startup DigiGage uses motion sensors to scroll the pre-rendered images, building and floor-specific content on a screen embedded into the wall as the cab moves up and down.

The high-speed observation deck elevators accelerate to a former world-record certified speed of 1,010 metres per minute (61 km/h) in 16 seconds, and then it slows down for arrival with subtle air pressure sensations.

Passengers enter horizontal compartments that form a train, tilting to maintain level orientation as they ascend the curved tracks within the Arch.

Guests ascending to the 67th, 69th, and 70th level observation decks (dubbed "Top of the Rock") atop the GE Building at Rockefeller Center in New York City ride a high-speed glass-top elevator.

Examples: Internet of things (IOT) technology application is being used in elevators to improve performance, operations, monitoring, maintenance with help of remote diagnostics, real time notifications and predictive behavioral insights.