PRT Elevator

PRT Elevator is one name for an advanced elevator concept that might make extremely tall or large buildings much more practical, or might allow higher overall elevator capacity in more moderate buildings while reducing the amount of space consumed by those elevators.

Conventional elevators go up and down in a shaft, one elevator per shaft, stopping at intermediate floors.   In the tallest buildings, there are multiple elevators per shaft, each traveling over a limited range.  Passengers must transfer from an elevator that travels, for example, from the 1st to 40th floors, to an elevator that travels from the 40th floor to the 80th.   This is done to increase capacity:  as elevator trips become longer, the time to complete a trip increases.  But because the building is very large, demand is also very high, and in order to meet it, the number of shafts required would consume a sizable part of the building.

A different approach might be to allow the elevator vehicles move between shafts in order to bypass each other as they're stopped.  People familiar with PRT will recognize this as very similar to an offline station.  Such an elevator would allow many vehicles per shaft (as many as .33 per floor: 26 in an 80 story building).  This very much higher capacity per shaft would require far fewer shafts and allow far more non-stop trips, providing much better service.

There are many technical issues to be solved before such elevators become practical, including powering the elevators (existing elevators use cables or hydraulic pistons), switching or steering the elevators, providing a similar level of reliability to existing elevators (existing elevators have several extremely reliable safety mechanisms), and control.  None of these seem intractable, but a lot of hard work will be required to solve them.

In its most extreme form, these flexibly routed elevators can also be routed horizontally and diagonally.  Viewers of the Star Trek television series will recognize this as a TurboLift.

The author is aware of very little actual development that's taken place on either a PRT Elevator or a Turbolift, but doesn't see any fundamental barriers.  Some conceptual work has been done on the Spanish ATS PRT system.  The author thinks it is workable but it remains a concept only.


This article was originally at http://www.advancedtransit.net/atrawiki/index.php?title=TurboLift but AtraWiki seems to have malfunctioned.