"Vertical Metro" elevator system.

[Cobraroll 138]

I hope this is the right place to put this. The forum description says "Architecture", and I guess this sorta is architectural. Now well, othis issue has been on my mind for a few days now, kinda like how you can get a song stuck in your head. I need to get it out somewhere, and this seems to be the right place.

We've all seen or heard of them. New buildings with three-digit floor counts are in the planning or being constructed all over the sphere we like to call Earth. And like in the city games we know and love, a lot of people will have to move from point A to B inside these mahoosive skyscrapers.

The problem is, all traffic has to pass through Ground Floor at some point. The further up you go, the less traffic. The lower you go, the more people. Generally.

Nowaydays, transportation happens via elevators (if you have access to the Internet, you've probably ridden one). These are simply cars on a vertical rail (more or less, not going into details here), going through elevator shafts in the buildings. So far, so good. However, a meagre number of one car may operate the same stretch of shaft. This is because they only go in shuttle mode, going back and forth between floors. As you might notice, this seems highly inefficent. However, it works well for smaller buildings with relatively little traffic.

But what to do when you reach a scale of more than a hundred floors?

For a start, long before that you will reach a point where an elevator shaft can't operate all floors in the building. I'm no elevator expert, never been in a building with more than ten-fifteen floors myself (we don't have many of them in Norway), so I don't know what number of floors an elevator car is limited to, but I'll guess somewhere in the vincinity of 50. There are several solutions to this problem:

 - Express elevators is one of them. These elevators skip specific floors and jump straight to the goodies (usually, skylobbies or observation decks). However, the longer the shaft, the longer the response time. Even though they are a great way to get down to street level, waiting times can be a pain.

 - Double-deck elevators operate two floors at a time. This is great for moving goods, etc without disturbing passenger flow. However, they are still stuck to one shaft, and you might end up a floor higher/lower than you intended. Thus, there will be more stops.

 - The Paternoster ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster ) is another solution. These are basically ferris wheels crossed with escalators and allow for a constant traffic flow. However, they are painfully slow.

BUT: They have a vital advantage: you can stuff in a lot of cars in the same shaft.

Not too long ago, I came up with another idea. Would it be feasible to merge the paternoster with the express elevator (hence the topic title)? Would it actually be doable to make a Vertical Metro? I'm going to discuss this system a little.

The concept:

OK, here we've got a really tall skyscraper, with, let's say a hundred usable floors. It contains mostly offices, and about 20 000 people work here every day. Most people begin work at 8-9 AM, and finish at 4-5 PM. Needless to say, the place is a mess from 7:30 to 5:30, and during lunch hour. The building has a lobby at ground floor (floor 1), and skylobbies at floors 25, 50, 75 and 100.

The concept I'm talking about requires a large donut-shaped elevator shaft, a loop consisting of two vertical shafts running the entire height of the building, and shafts connecting those at the ends, to form a 0. Inside this shaft, we place ten cars. Yes, ten. In the same shaft.

The trick is as follows: Each car departs every other minute. It goes a full 20 floors in a given direction (clockwise, if you look at the shafts from the sides), before stopping at one of the lobbies. People go out. Repeat until you reach the top. One of the vertical shafts is reserved for downwards traffic, another for upwards. Everybody has to leave at floor 100 or 1. This way, there will be one queue for downwards traffic, another for upwards, in every skylobby (save for the top/bottom floors). When a car has reached top (or ground) floor, it somehow transfers between shafts (I will adress this process later). Then it picks up passengers who are going in the opposite direction. Departure every other minute, as all cars have to go at the same time in order to avoid congestion. In order to be effective, each car would have to have a quite big capacity (more than 40 passengers).

 

The problems:

*First and foremost, propulsion. A regular elevator works with a motor in one end who pulls the car up the shaft (or slows its fall). With several cars in one shaft, they will have to share a method of propusion, or have a way to move independently of each other.

      - All cars could be connected on a single chain, driven by motors located in the building's basement. However, these would have to be quite strong, and the chain would require lots of upkeep.

      - Cables could attach to and detatch from the cars continously. Each cable could cover a stretch between skylobbies, for example, and go back to pick up the next car when they stop to let passenger on/off. However, this include lots of machinery rooms for the cables (one for each of the ten stretches between lobbies)

      - The cars could yield their own engines and work their way up the shafts by their own power. However, riding the elevator would be a noisy experience.

      - Other ideas?

This is a point where I need some input.

*Then, changing shafts. For a car to go between two shafts, there would be two main ways to do it. One involves moving sideways through a horizontal shaft, making the system rectangular. The other means pulling it through a curved loop, and the system would resemble a 0.

 - The first way would require so-called "catch cars", boxes that the "passenger car" would have to be placed in, and the "passenger car" would be transfered between these. The Catch cars would only operate one shaft. Problem: The catch cars would have to be able to bypass each other, as they only bring the "passenger car" from top to bottom or vice versa.

 - The second way would inevitably require hinges, otherwise the cars would be turned upside down. I'd imagine some kind of system similar to the one found on Top Spin theme park attractions: http://www.hussrides.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=66&Itemid=112 , with hinges on either side of the car.

*Air supply to the cars is another issue. The cars would move continously, and always have a fair share of people within it. However, this isn't a major problem in smaller elevators, so I guess this is a smaller issue.

 

The Advantages:

 - First and foremost, capacity vs room. A vertical metro would be able to shuffle hundreds of people from floor to floor per minute on average, using only two shafts. However, people would have to change elevators at skylobbies. Then again, these could utilise their own sets of shafts, and only overlap at skylobbies.

 - Second, speed. In theory, it would take four minutes to get to the top, but that is if the metro stops at every skylobby.

The Disadvantages:

 - You're practically forced to change elevators at least once if you're not going from ground floor to a floor lower than 24. Going from floor 15 to 62, for instance, would require two elevator changes. But you could be using the same shaft twice.

 - If one car jams, the entire system does. However, it would still just put one shaft out of function.

 - Requires separate loading/unloading areas to be able to go on time. And you'd need two loading and unloading areas per skylobby (one for groundbound cars, one for skybound).

 - In order to be effective, the building in question would have to be HUGE. Even Burj Khalifa is smaller than the target group of the Vertical Metro.

The system in a nutshell:

Think of the skyscraper as several separate buildings (usually stacked on top of each other). Let's place these buildings in a circle, along a train track that is the Vertical Metro. Now, they are separate entities on their own. They would have their own internal communications, elevator serving only the "building" in question, but the Metro joins them together like a train line going from building to building in an endless circle.

Would it be feasible, or at least doable? Have I made myself clear enough? Should I add diagrams? If so, how do I add images?

Any thoughts?

[halicem 16]

Magnets, is the closest to reality solution there is for your propulsion problem.

In fact, here's something that's close to what you're proposing using magnets:

If vertical metros become a reality, then you know what's next... a high speed vertical metro project or hsvmp for short.. haha jk =)

[Mr G 2.0 1]

I also thought about this but for a tall mountain city that you can't build a round down. then that connects to some sought of rail/road transport

[BattleshipAgincourt 1]

I just wrote an elaborate message and the wretched 'must be between 1 and 256 characters' issue wouldn't let me post it! Half an hour wasted! So a little less eloquently...

I thought of a system where you divide a system of ropes among a single shaft. Rather than having one system of ropes for a single car, why not attack the ropes to a series of modules which run independent of each other? You can operate two or three cars in a single shaft if you use a system of modules which attach to the cars and transfer them to the opposite shaft at the top and bottom floors. By doing this, you can designate a lot less space to these module shafts and multiply the number of cars in the elevator shaft by two or three times. When the elevator car is transfered to the opposite shaft, the modules will return to the bottom/top floor to take on a new car.

What do you think of this?

[Xyloxadoria 1,099]

The crazy architects in dubai have an idea similar to your large singe central core.

[citiesxlfan42 27]

That Vertical City is mad! I'll start a whole thread on that. It's cool. But a waste of time and planning.

I agree with this new idea!