Elevators are about to get a major upgrade: the ability to go sideways, thanks to magnetic levitation technology. German industrial behemoth ThyssenKrupp is promising that two-axis travel (“the holy grail of the elevator industry”) will revolutionize intra-building travel, and that they will have it operational in 2016.
Elevators travel up and down as they are hoisted and lowered on cables from the very top of the building they inhabit. It isn’t particularly efficient, because you put a lot of energy into lifting the cables that the elevator is attached to, and it isn’t particularly versatile, because the cable restricts your potential directions of movement. To solve both of those problems at once, you need a completely new non-cable propulsion system for your elevator.
ThyssenKrupp’s MULTI elevator technology uses maglev capsules and will be more energy efficient than traditional cable elevators. By running multiple cabins moving in a loop at up to 5 m/s, the maglev elevators will be able to carry 50 percent more people while reducing wait times to between 15 and 30 seconds. The shafts themselves will also be about half the size of elevator shafts that rely on cables, which means more room for developers to put in something useful.
While the concept video shows elevators moving sideways across floors, the initial proof of concept implementation will likely only involve sideways movement at the top and bottom of the loop. ThyssenKrupp says they are having a prototype installed in a 240-meter tower now being built in Rottweil, Germany, that will be open to the public in 2016.
