Name: Elevator Expert Explains ‘People Flow’ in World’s Soon-to-Be Second Tallest Building
Uploaded: 2023-09-07T09:30:00Z
Duration: 8 min 2 s
Description: Malaysia’s Merdeka 118 will become the second tallest skyscraper in the world in 2024. An elevator engineer expert breaks down what’s involved in designing an elevator system that meets people’s expectations while also balancing cost and space. Photo illustration: MacKenzie Coffman

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Malaysia’s Merdeka 118 will become the second tallest skyscraper in the world in 2024. An elevator engineer expert breaks down what’s involved in designing an elevator system that meets people’s expectations while also balancing cost and space. Photo illustration: MacKenzie Coffman

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Elevator Expert Explains ‘People Flow’ in World’s Soon-to-Be Second Tallest Building

Presenter: At 2,233 feet tall, the Merdeka 118 in Malaysia will become the second tallest skyscraper in the world in 2024, and building that high requires an elevator system that can seamlessly move thousands of people a day.

One of the things that makes people most frustrated about elevators is having to wait for them. So once you get to about 90 seconds, they're pushing the button again, thinking that that's gonna make it come faster.

Presenter: But you want to use the minimum number necessary.

Anything over that and you're wasting money because you lose all that leaseable space.

Presenter: As city skylines rise, balancing these needs is a billion dollar industry. By 2027, the global elevator and escalator market is expected to be over $145 billion. So we asked an expert to show us how engineers designed an elevator system to service all 118 floors. To optimize the flow of people through the building, elevator engineers divided it into zones.

It's multiple buildings inside one structure, if you will. At the very bottom of the building is retail and the waiting space for the tourist area, and then all the way at the top is the observation deck. Now in the middle of the building, we have two different uses. We have office space from here to here, and then here we have hotel, and this could also be potentially residential. So in the main part of the building you have these three zones.

Presenter: Gonzalez said this helps them group together people going to similar areas, and it reduces the total number of floors that each elevator has to service.

All of that math has to be done and stacked on top of the other math in order to ensure that you get the elevator design correct, because fixing it later is really hard and really, really expensive.

Presenter: But that's just one step.

To ensure that everybody can get to where they're trying to go as efficiently as possible, we use destination control, or DCS.

Presenter: DCS is especially effective during peak hours of operation, like when office workers arrive in the morning or hotel guests check in around the evening. With DCS, passengers walk up to a control panel and select their floors, then the system tells them which elevators to go to, based on the arrival floor, destination floor, and number of passenger requests.

Steve: You can compare it to a local train versus an express train. If you're on a local train, you're stopping at every single stop.

Presenter: This is especially useful for floors that have a comparatively high amount of traffic, like the observation deck.

All of the people that are in this car are going to the exact same place, because it's only going one place, starting at the bottom and going all the way to the top. So how do you get people from the ground all the way to the top, the observation deck, in roughly a minute?

Presenter: There are many factors at play, but two of the big ones are capacity and speed. You want to move as many people as possible at once but there's a limited amount of elevator shafts in a building, so engineers look for ways to maximize how much they can get out of one hoistway. One solution is to add twin elevators, which are two cars operating independently in the same shaft. Another is to use double deck elevators.

Steve: And a double deck elevator is exactly what you would think. It's two cars stacked on top of one another, car here and a car here, so they're positioned so that when the elevator stops, you can get in on either one of these floors.

Presenter: Merdeka 118 has over 35 of them.

So the capacity of an elevator is sort of an interesting calculation because you think about it as how much weight you can put in the elevator. It also determines the floor area of the elevator. What we're really talking about in a passenger car is how many people we can fit in it. The rule of thumb that you use is about 13 people per thousand kilograms of capacity.

Presenter: The double deck elevators in Merdeka 118 can carry 4,000 kilograms, or about 8,800 pounds, which adds up to 52 people. Multidirectional elevators are also in the works. This tech is being developed by another company, TK Elevators. Instead of relying on hydraulics or cables, these elevators run along linear motors that look like tracks, so they aren't limited to only going up and down, they can go sideways too, which means you can operate more cars simultaneously on the same line, sort of like a subway. But multidirectional elevators are still being tested. Most skyscraper elevators still rely on cable systems.

And if you're gonna move a lot of weight really fast, then you need a big piece of equipment.

Presenter: Speed itself varies based on design and use case. These motors used in Merdeka 118 can move elevators up to 38 miles per hour, but for passenger cars.

It isn't just flipping a switch and moving people as fast as you can, you have to think about the comfort of those people. So one of the ways that we can test for that, and it's pretty low tech but it's incredibly effective, is the coin test. We'll take a typical coin, just like that, and we'll balance it on the handrail in the elevator, and if the elevator ride is really good, the coin will stay on its edge the whole trip.

Presenter: But elevators that carry goods instead of people can go a lot faster without worrying about comfort.

So these goods elevators will move at just over 10 meters per second, which is over 2,000 feet per minute. If you've got really fast goods elevators, it makes moving the people side easier.

Presenter: But a big limitation for elevators is actually height.

Steve: So in the low-rise buildings, you might use a hydraulic elevator, one that has a piston that you've probably seen pushes the elevator up.

Presenter: Hydraulic elevators can't produce enough energy to get an elevator all the way up a skyscraper.

So here we use rope or steel cables or another form to pull the elevator up from the very bottom to the very top.

Presenter: The taller the building, the more steel cable is needed, and steel cables are heavy. To get an elevator up to 1,600 feet, you need about 40,000 pounds of cable. Past that, the building would need a separate elevator with separate cables to keep going. But new tech is being developed to increase elevator capabilities that could solve some of these issues. In the Burj Khalifa, elevator manufacturer, Otis, use polyurethane-coated steel belts that are stronger than normal steel cables, and KONE's UltraRope uses carbon fiber.

So inside the UltraRope you can see that there are four strands. Each one of those is a carbon fiber strand. The weight of the steel rope is about 1/2 a pound a foot, and the weight of an UltraRope is about a 10th of a pound per foot. If we think about a 55-story building, the difference in rope weight is roughly that of a Toyota Prius.

Presenter: Which means that now a single elevator can run from the bottom to the top of a skyscraper over 3,000 feet tall. That's taller than the Burj Khalifa. UltraRope was used to update the elevators in this building.

You can see it's a very narrow building and so it's susceptible to sway. There's a restaurant at the top, but there's no kitchen at the top, so what would happen is, in high winds, the elevators would need to shut down for safety, but that meant the people at the top couldn't eat. Now this rope, because it weighs so much less, it has significantly less momentum, so even if the building does move around a bit, the rope doesn't contribute to the movement like it does with steel rope.

Presenter: Over half of the world's population live in city centers. According to the UN, by 2025, it will be almost 70%, which means that mega tall skyscrapers like the Merdeka 118 will likely become more common.

When we build buildings like this, they last essentially forever, so making sure that the elevator systems last a long time is really important.

An Elevator Expert Explains How to Move People Up 118 Floors, Fast

Each episode of Pro Perfected uses a quintessential expert in the specific topic area to explain how they would perfect a common problem.

An Elevator Expert Explains How to Move People Up 118 Floors, Fast

Pro Perfected

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