Elevators are essential for means of a vertical transportation. Recently, high-rise buildings are increasing. Those elevator ropes become longer. As a result, the natural period of the elevator rope becomes closer to the natural period of the high-rise building. The risk of resonance increases. When the high-rise buildings receive an external force such as the strong wind and the earthquake, the elevator rope may sway intensely. The rope may be hooked to the equipment in the hoistway. The accurate analysis of a rope is important to grasp the actual rope behavior during an earthquake. In this study, the free vibration test on elevator ropes is carried out with an element testing equipment. Furthermore the vibration characteristic of elevator ropes is investigated. In this paper, the free vibration test was carried out with the 5 mm-diameter elevator rope, further the vibration characteristic was investigated. As a result, it was confirmed that the damping ratio of the elevator rope depends on the displacement of the horizontal direction.

Generally, the rope-type elevator has multiple main ropes. If the groove depths of the traction machine are not uniform, the tension is different for each rope of the main ropes, and the rope with a high load will deteriorate faster. In this paper, the tension flucturation model of main ropes, in the case the sheave had four deep grooves and five shallow grooves, for 2：1 roping elevator was proposed. The tension fluctuations were calculated from the difference in the amount of rope lengths which were fed out by rotation between the deep grooves and shallow grooves. And rope slip was considered for each rope on the traction machine and cage/counterweight sheave. Also sheave rotations in the cage/counterweight sheave were considered. Because these sheaves were able to rotate freely by the deference of total tention for each side. Finally, the validity of the model was confirmed by comparing the simulation and experiment results. The tolerance of the groove depths can be caliculated using this model.

Elevators run vertically by suspension ropes, therefore each rope has to be adjusted correctly to fulfill each tension balance. That contributes to establish a long life against elevator ropes. If a groove wear of the traction sheave causes difference against other grooves, the difference induces rope tension fluctuation while changing the car position. Conventional elevator models to evaluate the rope tension have not considered the detailed winding behavior of the rope on the sheave. As the winding amount of the rope contains the rope deformation, the deformation should be considered to evaluate the rope length and the rope tension in an elevator tension model. This paper shows a simple elevator model with a single spring model against the rope. The derived model can not only calculate the appropriate winding amount against the rope spring model, but also get a faster solution even though the elevator system has a complicated roping configuration. The proposed simulation model is validated by experiments.

The escalator handrail is driven by friction with the drive sheave. Handrails suffer from problems such as reduced handrail life and slip due to improper estimation of friction. In order to solve these problems, much research has been done in the past, but the problems are still not solved. This research tried to solve these problems by using simulation. In the constructed simulation model, the handrail is divided into 12 mass elements, and each mass element is connected by spring element. Using the constructed model, we compared the results of the test machine and simulation on the pressing force of the pressure roller at the time of slip. In this paper, we introduce the constructed model that can analyze the handrail behavior, and the simulation results using it.

Detection of the elevator car and counterweight is most important for the safety operation in the elevator maintenance. The purpose of this research is the development of the moving target alert system with millimeter-wave radar, which can detect the velocity and position of the moving target such as the elevator car and counterweight. In this report, we benchmarked the sensing method for detecting the moving target in the elevator hoistway and designed the moving target alert system. We developed the prototype measurement system with the 77-GHz millimeter-wave radar. Measured results of detecting the car and counterweight showed that the developed millimeter-wave radar set in the elevator pit can detect the car and the counterweight in the maintenance speed (15 m/min) and normal speed (105 m/min) within 10 m of the elevator pit.

Inspection using magnetic sensors based on the magnetic flux leakage testing method as soundness evaluation of wire ropes is being performed. Recently, it has been studied as detailed soundness evaluation method of the wire rope by analyzing the measurement data of multi magnetic sensors as an image grayscale. However, this is the position identification of breakages rope axis direction. For this reason, if it is not the position identification of breakages on the rope circumferential direction, it is difficult to determine soundness evaluation of wire ropes. In this study, there are three characteristics (types (crown and valley), number of wire breakages, the distance between detection plane and wire rope surface) of the breakage. In this paper, the magnetic flux density of the wire rope caused by the number of breakages is examined using numerical analysis.