Kone's fibre UltraRope makes light work of "lifting" to new heights
17 Jun 2013
Elisha Otis could be said to have truly laid the foundation for the rise and rise of modern cities with their towering buildings way back in 1854, when he ordered an axeman to cut the rope used to hoist him aloft.
The crowd at the World Fair in New York stood speechless as his new lift dropped only a few inches instedad of crashing before the automatic braking system arrested the downward movement.
From that moment on New York city came to truly symbolise the motto of New York state – Excelsior- ever higher, as ''elevators'' gave confidence to people to work, live and soar ever higher.
This week in what could possibly open up a whole new 'upward movement' in high-rise technology, Finnish liftmaker Kone announced that after a decade of development at its laboratory in Lohja, which sits above a 333-metre-deep mineshaft, used as a test bed by the firm, it had devised a system that should be able to raise an elevator a kilometre (3,300 feet) or more above ground level.
This effectively doubles the height to which structures could be built, considerably freeing up one of the main constraints on the height of buildings, thanks to Kone's technology which would use carbon fibres to replace steel in cables.
The problem with steel cables is their weight. In a lift, the motor doing the lifting has not only to pull up the car, but also the flexible travelling cables that carry the electricity and communications.
Though counterweights serve to make the job somewhat easier, even so, in a lift travelling up to 500 metres (the upper limit at present) steel ropes make up around three-quarters of the moving mass of the machine.
But according to Kone it would be able to reduce the weight of lift ropes by around 90 per cent with its carbon-fibre replacement, dubbed UltraRope.
Carbon fibres are both stronger and lighter than steel, and have great tensile strength, meaning they are extremely hard to break when subject to pulls.
That strength comes from the chemical bonds between carbon atoms, the same strength that the bonds give to diamonds. Kone technology embeds tubes made of carbon fibres in epoxy, enveloping the result in a tough coating to make it resistant to wear and tear.
According to Johannes de Jong, a 400-metre-high lift using UltraRope would weigh 1,170 kg as against steel ropes that would weight about 18,640 kg. The lift using UltraRope would weigh 45 per cent less than a conventional lift using steel rope.
