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Elevators have come a long way from a wooden box hooked by a pulley in the 300 BC to a human-powered, counter-weighted, personal elevator build in 1743, hydraulic crane build in the year 1846, to the 1st electric elevator in the 19th century. The elevator trends have been improvising unfailingly.

With the growing influx of urban dwellers and rising sea levels, the developers are constructing high rise buildings, creating the need for incorporating vertical transport in the infrastructure. Installing elevators and escalators makes mobility convenient, especially for people with disabilities. These vertical conveyances are the marvels of engineering, shuttling passengers and freight, up and down hundreds of stories. While the traditional rope-and-pulley systems have existed for hundreds of years, many companies have now begun to explore a wide and somewhat outlandish array of alternatives due to technology advancement and increasing concerns about the environment. Considering, half of the world’s population living in cities, the energy demand is expected to increase significantly, therefore efficient vertical transportation can become a pressing challenge. For this purpose, various new technologies have been introduced to reduce energy usage of buildings and contribute to the effort of cities in lowering their energy consumption.

Here are some of the technologies adapted in elevators to lower energy consumption and make them efficient.

Regenerative Drives

Regenerative drives are remarkable advancement in energy-efficient elevator technology. They recycle energy rather than wasting it as heat. The elevators equipped with this technology are highly energy-efficient ad reduce the energy consumption up to 70 percent.

When an elevator moves up with a light load and comes down with a heavy load, the lift system generates more power than it consumes which results in considerable amount of energy loss as power is lost in the form of heat in traditional elevator drives. However, in elevators equipped with regenerative drives, the case is different. These drives capture the generated heat while the elevator is in use and converts it into reusable energy. This energy is transferred back into the system. In this way, the regenerative drives can save up to 70% of energy and reduce the strain and cost of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, eliminating excess heat in the building that would have been otherwise wasted.

Machine-Room-Less (MRL) Technology

Machine-Room-Less Elevators are most energy efficient types of traction elevators that do not have a dedicated machine room above the elevator shaft. The motors and all of the other equipment normally housed in a machine room above conventional elevators are designed to fit into the hoist way. These space-saving improvements eliminate the need to build and supply energy to a machine room. MRL elevators are energy efficient, require less space, and their operation and reliability are on par with gear-less traction elevators.

MRL elevators are comparable to geared traction elevators in terms of initial and maintenance costs, but they have relatively low energy consumption compared to geared elevators. MRL technology enables less heat dissipation and energy consumption than the larger versions.

Machine-room-less elevators have a maximum travel distance of up to 250 feet and can travel at speeds up to 500 feet-per-minute. MRL elevators are becoming the most popular choice for mid-rise buildings where the travel distance is up to 250 feet.

Double-Deck Elevator

A double-deck elevator or double-deck lift is an elevator where one cab is stacked on top of another. This allows passengers on two consecutive floors to be able to use the elevator simultaneously, significantly increasing the passenger capacity of an elevator shaft. Such a scheme can improve efficiency in buildings where the volume of traffic would normally have a single-deck elevator stopping at every floor. For example, a passenger may board the lower deck (which serves only odd-numbered floors) at basement level while another passenger may board the upper deck (which serves even-numbered floors) on the ground floor—the cab serving even floors is on top of the cab serving odd floors.

Double-deck elevators occupy less building core space than traditional single-deck elevators do for the same level of traffic. In skyscrapers, this allows for much more efficient use of space as the floor area required by elevators is significant.

The other main technique for reducing the floor area occupied by elevators is shared-shaft elevators where multiple elevators use different sections of the same shaft to serve different floors with skylobbies separating the sections.

A double deck elevator allows mass passenger handling capacity, high traveling speed and space saving for high rise building.

Destination Dispatch Control System

Destination dispatch is an optimization technique used for multi-elevator installations, in which groups of passengers heading to the same destinations use the same elevators, thereby reducing waiting and travel times. Comparatively, the traditional approach is where all passengers wishing to ascend or descend enter any available lift and then request their destination. Using destination dispatch, passengers request travel to a particular floor using a keypad, touch screen, or proximity card room-key prior in the lobby and are immediately directed to an appropriate elevator car.

Destination Dispatch Control System improves system efficiency and passenger experience by effectively shortening wait and travel times. The elimination of wasted energy is a positive change, reducing the user wait-time and increasing handling capacity by up to 30%. The system also allows for much more flexibility in elevator grouping, lift core layouts and overall building design.

Rope-Free Elevators

The implementation of rope-free multidirectional elevator systems could reduce elevator wait times, optimizing costs, and increasing energy efficiency. These systems, named MULTI, are powered by electromagnetic induction that causes magnetic levitation, which moves the elevator cars side to side as well as up and down. This method removes limitations caused by ropes, which restrict building heights and slow down the elevator car. It also allows multiple elevator cars to fit into one shaft and move throughout the building in a loop. Users experiences shorter wait times and owners can better maximize their available floor space. These systems can also reduce a buildings electric bill by up to 60%