Inside The Lab That Tests Elevator Free-Falls

oh my God that is terrifying I'm in freezing Finland to check out this little building here now I know what you're thinking and don't worry we haven't run out of great projects to talk about and started really scraping the Barrel in there is the only place on Earth that does freefall drop tests on skyscraper elevators inside there's a shaft deep enough to comfortably swallow New York's Cry of the building or London Shard it's where the machines that make our world's tallest and most iconic buildings viable get put through their paces and I'm going down there I'm traveling all the way from Coles dark London to even colder darker Finland to visit this building it's in a small town about an hour outside Helsinki and trust me when I say there's not a lot else here not even one of those lovely warm finished saunas that quite frankly I'd rather be in right now but what happens inside this small building is actually critical to enabling every skyscraper in the world to function this snow-covered near Wilderness is where Coney the elevator engineering company has built its high-rise laboratory now you've probably already been in a Coney elevator or escalator and not even realized it you won't just find them in Singapore's Marina Bay Sands or London's leadenhall skyscraper they're everywhere airports train stations hotels you name it Coney systems move over a billion people on this planet every day yes I'm saying elevator instead of lift despite being British because well most of the world says elevator and you're all watching in most of the world everything our elevators need to do is put the test right here from endurance comfort and aerodynamics to speed energy use and of course safety believe it or not under this building there are actually 11 test shafts including the deepest in the world now testing elevators in a country that doesn't really have any proper skyscrapers is tricky for koni it meant either building an expensive test Tower of its own or digging an even more expensive and very deep hole and that's where the idea of repurposing an existing hole came in first opened back in 1997 Coney's high-rise laboratory is still part of a working Limestone mine reaching a depth of 362 meters deep enough to swallow the entire Eiffel Tower of those 11 test shafts seven are dedicated to Super and megatool testing while the other four are for Mid and low rise buildings uh skyscrapers wouldn't work or even be viable without the elevator you're not going to want to live or work 100 stories up if it means a hundred flights of stairs it was the elevator along with advances in steel frame and Concrete Construction that enable their skyscrapers to rise managing Urban density and helping Financial Centers to Boom well it might sound a bit dramatic what happens in this little nondescript underground facility is kind of critical to how our world functions this is also the only place in the world that can do full-scale high-rise emergency brake tests and that's a pretty crucial one because we've all been in an elevator and wondered what might happen if it all went wrong that's why I'm starting above ground and heading to the top of that insane drop shaft oh my God that is terrifying so from up here Coney can carry out three four tests on elevator cars where the car drops at speeds up to 26 meters a second and they can check the brakes kick in long before the worst happens they do all that using one of these which is a safety rig basically like a dummy elevator so the tested safety gears are located here in the lower beam and then we have a secondary safety case also there then we are loading this full of Weights depending on the test we want to do and then practically we are just dropping it and once it reads to the 100 kilometer per hour then we are stopping it and we need to stop it smoothly tool that's working is a clever and excitingly named Contraption called an overspeed Governor the steel rope carrying the elevator passes through it at the top of the shaft if the elevator starts moving much faster than normal normally by around 20 percent the emergency brake system is activated safety gear devices located in the frame are fitted with special wedges that have Servo mechanisms inside which adjust the braking Force automatically when applied these wedges are forced upwards making contact with the guide rails and bringing the elevator to a halt at a controlled speed so now we know how to stop them if necessary how are they made to move in the first place well elevators are powered by a motor but if you're going to be hauling one up a super tool skyscraper at speeds of up to 17 meters a second it would have to be huge so we're now in the machine room and it's kind of dominated by this one piece of equipment here what is this this is gonna Echo disc mx100 it's the large largest hoisting machine for oil elevators that we have so this sits at the top of a lift shaft in what kind of buildings will this go in this goes to the very tallest buildings that we have delivered like Civic Tower in Beijing so something like this gets lifted up by these I guess these lifting Rings here like 118 stories into the air on top of a lift cells as you can imagine a building crane hoisting it to the machine room so yeah yeah how much does it weigh it's made something like four times okay but it's not all about the size of your motor even with the most powerful one available most elevators can only go up to 500 meters and that's all because of the component that goes in there the Rope you see the higher an elevator needs to travel the longer its steel cable needs to be and you don't need to be an engineer to realize that means you're going to need more steel the problem is at a certain point all the way to the elevator car it's passengers and that steel rope becomes too much according to Kony on a 500 meter building that can be around 27 000 kilograms or the weight of 10 off-road vehicles so there's actually a limit to how high an elevator can travel they can't just go on forever to rise higher than 500 meters very tall buildings have required people to change elevators at least until this new innovation came along enter Ultra rope a new kind of cable made from carbon fiber that's being tested at tutori it's seven times lighter than steel more durable and can the label elevators up to a kilometer long if we can ever make a building that tall yes we're looking at you Jenna Tower Ultra rope was actually part tested by a Finnish Coney engineer in his sauna we kid you not it proved a warm environment for the new metals and testing his Concepts now hot metal Sharp Tools and being naked sounds like a dangerous mix but at least it saved him having to spend too much time at those freezing tutorial mines where I find myself now oh to be in one of those Finnish saunas when it comes to ultra rope it's a case of the tool of the tower the bigger the benefits across 500 meters the energy saving as compared to using a conventional steel rope is around 30 percent and the higher you go the greater the efficiencies roll on some more Burj khalifas now that matters because we really need to make our cities and structures more sustainable and energy efficient Technologies like this can help reduce a building's carbon footprints all tropes also been chosen for skyscrapers built in places where atmospheric conditions are challenging like on the new Brisbane quarter in Australia's third largest city developed by Share Group with contractor Multiplex handling design and construction the luxury complex includes a hotel 40-story office building and an 80-story residential Tower Coney is used right across all three of those developments and also in the shared space as well we've elected to go with ultra rope in the um in the commercial Tower it's got a fair bit to do with a speed and B obviously humidity brisbane's got high humidity and with the longer rope runs obviously they get a research on them and obviously with ultra rope it decreases the amount of downtime that we experiences for those the cane Ultra for us lowered the risk of lift shutdown in high winds due to building movement when you get these tall towers there's a certain level of sway in the buildings and in high winds this can be more significant as a lift is being pulled up to the top of the tower this way can send the lift into error but with the ultra rope this pull of the lift card at the top was more Centric and is designed to avoid the deviation and you know subsequent errors that you can get the technology is ideal for heavier load double deck elevators too that's where two cars are placed on top of each other creating twice the capacity it so happens that today one of those massive lifts is being installed right here in one of the shafts I've been told that doesn't happen very often but to go and see it I've got a head underground and to the very bottom of this mind 362 meters below where I'm standing to get down there well I've got to take one of these of course this elevator can only carry me the first 200 meters but it's going to do it very quickly oh and this is where you come out in an actual cave down here is where the facilities life as part of a mind becomes all or noticeable so what I've got to ask what's involved in turning a limestone mine it's a Coney High spec test facility what what did you have to do well here was actually 200 meters of shaft already available but then we had to knock the rest more than 100 meters out to build the more than 300 meter tall test pass a little bit for us the irrelevators are used in skyscrapers all around the world why why do play start this matter well this is the place where our Engineers when they design the solutions they're able to really put it in the tests which we would never be able to do in the normal building and we bring our customers here to actually witness our capabilities so that they can trust on us when they build one of those tallest buildings but we're only just over halfway to the bottom of this place and I've got a bit further to go [Music] so this is pretty unnerving but I'm now at the very deepest part of my journey surrounded by granite rock 362 meters under Finland now if movies have taught me anything it's that going to the bottom of an elevator is usually a bad idea but not today because now I'm getting the chance to see how one of those massive double deck elevators gets put in place so what we are doing here is that we are installing the double deck test elevator we are not just installing the elevator here we are also testing our installation methods and instructions that all the methods and tools that we are using are safe and then we can repeat those same procedures there in the real side in in the skyscrapers it's crazy with like hundreds of stories underneath Finland right now but there's all this stuff going on down here how do you get all the kit and materials down how do these guys get to work every day is it is it through the lifts or is it through different tunnels so actually what is happening around here is the real mining operations so this place is full of tunnels so we can actually drive by a truck here down here and bring all the components in and then lift those do the elevator what's it like working down there you can imagine that humidity but it's in the other hand that our philosophy is that if the conditions are quite harsh and we can make our equipment work here and and keep those safe we can also guarantee that this really work then in the buildings where the conditions are much better [Music] like so many aspects of our built world around us elevators are something we all take for granted we all use them all the time but never really think about what it takes to make them run coming to places like this really helps lift the lid on that process this amazing facility is helping take elevators to new heights and all from the most surreal of locations to think that places like this exist in a country with hardly any skyscrapers shows that sometimes to see all the incredible stuff in this industry you've got to go beneath the surface [Music] well I'm absolutely freezing so I'm going to go and jump in a nice warm finished sauna this video was made possible by Coney you can learn more about that at the link below there's also the charts to dive deeper on this and the topics on our Channel over on the world's best construction podcast available right now wherever you get your podcasts including in freezing cold places like this and as always guys if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction from the channel that takes you down incredibly deep mine shafts in freezing cold countries click that subscribe button

Channel: The B1M

Views: 1,011,640

Keywords: B1M, TheB1M, Construction, architecture, engineering, The B1M, Fred Mills, building, elevators, lifts, kone, finland, helsinki, skyscrapers, ultrarope, brisbane, australia, multiplex, eiffel tower, chrysler building, the shard, citic tower, merdeka 118, burj khalifa, jeddah tower, mines, mining, caves, free-fall, otis, thyssen, schindler lifts, stannah lifts, elevator

Id: IRse3W-glVs

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023