Dynamic Lift Control for Improvements in Energy Efficiency

A lift’s energy behaviour is an important issue and R&D departments are constantly searching for ways to improve results. Focusing on the electrical-electronic area, it is already wellknown that the use of 3VF inverters and PMSM motors allows better energy results to be achieved. The combined use of real-time communications between lift control and inverter and the use of “direct approach to floor” function (we suggest to call this feature Direct To Floor in the paper) allows the realisation of an energy decision-making control panel and improvements to traditional energy consumption. From this point onwards, our objective is to present an improved concept for energy-efficiency based on the development of a new dynamic control. To achieve this, the following is important: 1 - Identify the different behaviours of the lift with regard to energyefficiency in each different stage of the journey, taking into account: the number of people travelling, the direction of travel, the distance to be travelled and the lift’s speed. 2 - Propose energy-saving improvements for each stage, always using DTF & sharing information in real time as a basis. 3 - Develop an intelligent control capable of taking decisions affecting energy-efficiency in real time. This allows the best energy-saving profile to be selected for each journey, adapting the curves as well as the motor and brake control in any situation. 4 - Using a certain energy profile and incorporating a certain set of proposals can produce good results in some circumstances and only acceptable results in others. For this reason, the smart lift control must always select the most suitable option. 5 - Show a comparative analysis of the results obtained with the Smart-ECO mode with traditional solutions, as well as a comparison with current regenerative systems. In this paper, results with ISO25745-2:2015 are also shown. The aim of this paper is to make an in-depth presentation of the studies carried out for the journey stages, the proposals and the obtained results. All the results shown have been taken from real lift installations.