Abstract
In recent years, various measures to cope with global environment problems have been strongly focused. And it has been said that energy saving of electric-use apparatus would be one of the potential solutions. On the other hand, a low-speed elevator with a diode rectifier input consumes the regenerated power from the electric motor as heat with resistors, which results in the remarkable energy loss in the whole elevator system.
This paper proposes an energy-saving elevator which can store the regenerated energy and discharge the stored energy at the power running of the machine. Therefore, a very high efficient elevator system can be achieved. Furthermore, this paper also focuses on three types technical possibilities of the elevator systems: a load-leveling type, an accumulation type, and an energy-saving type. Those technical possibilities were successfully verified with prototypes. Especially with the energy-saving type which utilized nickel hydoride batteries, 31% of the energy saving was attained.
