A Template for an Undergraduate Elective Final Year Lift (Elevator) Engineering Course

Lifts offer an ideal final year engineering capstone course, due to the multidisciplinary nature of its potential content. This paper sets out to develop a template for planning and delivering such a course at undergraduate engineering level based on experience gained at the School of Engineering at the University of Jordan. There are basically four streams within this course: traffic analysis and design; space and layout planning; mechanical lift engineering and electrical lift engineering. Thus, it is ideal as a final year undergraduate elective course for mechanical, electrical and mechatronics engineering programmes. The traffic engineering stream introduces the students to the basic concepts of the round-trip time, the interval, the handling capacity as well as basic introduction to the concept of group control and dispatching. The space and layout planning stream introduces the concepts of shaft dimensions, pit depth and headroom, as well as structural forces in the pit. The electrical stream introduces the student to the concept of a safety circuit and safety devices, DC and AC motors, drive systems as well as electronic logic controllers. The mechanical stream introduces the students to the main mechanical components such as gearboxes, ropes, safety gears, speed governors, sheaves, guide rails and buffers. Providing such an introductory course in elevator engineering allows the students to reinforce concepts that they had studied earlier in non-applied basic courses and provides an opportunity to develop multi-disciplinary integrated design skills. The long-term aim of this project is to build an open access repertoire of study material, assessment tools and question banks as well as software that can be used to deliver and study the course.