Dr. Albert So is a lift enthusiast with a pretty geeky dream. He foresees within 30 years lifts that travel horizontally as well as vertically. Instead of choosing a floor number, a lift passenger would select a room number. The lift, operating on the outside of the building, will then deliver the passenger directly to the room – through the window. Enough of that pesky walking down corridors.
Dr. So’s secret is magnetic levitation. Like the maglev train in Shanghai, which can travel up to 430 km per hour hovering over an electromagnetic force field, future lifts may ditch all those steel ropes and zip up and down their shafts freestyle, says So, adjunct professor in the department of building and construction at City University of Hong Kong. By relying on energy coils and magnetics, multiple lifts could function inside a single shaft simultaneously. Of course, that technology’s a way down the track yet – among the many problems, cost and safety are not the least – but research into maglev lifts is ongoing. As Toni D’Angelo, director of top range business at lift manufacturer Jardine Schindler, says, “Everyone moving objects in a predetermined direction is working with this technology.”
It may seem strange that D’Angelo and So, a committee member of the International Association of Elevator Engineers, get excited about those motorised boxes we ride between floors. But then, without lifts, Hong Kong wouldn’t exist as it does today.
“I find in almost every lift something very special to like,” says D’Angelo. “I just love them all.” And he has more reason than most lift-lovers to get excited these days. In February, his company won the contract to supply 40 double-deck elevators for the 490-metre International Commerce Centre, which will boast, among other things, the longest elevator shafts in the world. And while D’Angelo considers that Schindler’s “tallest” achievement, he says the greatest is just to properly service customers every day. In Hong Kong, that’s no mean feat. Home to about 50,000 lifts packed into a small and crowded environment, the SAR is, as D’Angelo says, “the El Dorado of lifts.” Hong Kong provides all the challenges lift manufacturers can face: it’s hectic, so lifts have to be fast; it’s dense, so lifts have to be compact; and it’s busy, so the lifts must be available around the clock. If a lift company can succeed here, it can succeed anywhere, he says.
Another company that has succeeded in Hong Kong is Otis, which draws its name from the founder of the modern elevator, Elisha Graves Otis, who developed the first safety brake to halt a cab’s fall in case of rope failure. That brake kick-started the elevator industry. “As a result of the invention, cities were born,” enthuses Dilip Rangnekar, communications director for Otis South Asia-Pacific. Otis is the owner of a new hoisting technology set to replace steel ropes: a polyurethane corded belt, reinforced with cables, as slim as that which holds a man’s pants in place and just an inch wide. The belt circumvents the need for ugly ‘machine rooms’ on tops of buildings that occupy space and require constant management. It is also more environmentally-friendly than the steel ropes, which need frequent oiling. “This is the future of the elevator,” Rangnekar pronounces.
Increasingly, environmentally-friendly lifts are becoming a concern. “I don’t think most lifts in Hong Kong are energy efficient,” says Dr. So. Energy efficiency is determined not only by how effectively lifts use available power (recent technology improves energy conservation), but also by how they collect and carry passengers. Lifts that stop less, for instance, are more energy efficient. That’s one of the reasons So’s favourite lift is Schindler’s Micronic 10, found in Tai Koo Place. The so-called intelligent lift is destination-controlled, meaning passengers select their floor level and the system tells them which lift to take so a number of people can travel to the same destination at once, thus minimising stoppage times between floors.
Passenger rescue is another area in which So thinks Hong Kong lifts could do better. When storms blow into Hong Kong, our power supply is vulnerable to voltage dips, which can stop lifts in their tracks, trapping passengers between floors. Firemen are often needed to extricate panicking passengers, at great expense – not to mention the trauma suffered by those stuck inside the cramped and dark cubicles. Imagine what would happen, then, if Hong Kong had a sudden complete power failure. Assuming 20 percent of the SAR’s lifts would be occupied – a conservative estimate, says So – that would mean passengers would need rescuing from about 10,000 lifts. The answer? We should follow Singapore’s example and install battery-powered Automatic Rescue Devices in the lifts, which could safely carry passengers to the nearest floor in the event of a power failure. So is very serious: “We cannot accept passengers being trapped inside lifts.” |
