Lift Upgrading Programme

A typical HDB Estate

Lift Upgrading Programme - LUP is a Housing and Development Board system that offers designed to improve the flat's access and personal convenience. It is heavily subsidised, making it very affordable for citizens. HDB blocks built before 1990 were not provided with 100% access to lift to meet demands for privacy.

Today, residents prefer to have lifts that serve every floor for speedier and more convenient access to their homes. This also benefits the elderly, families with very young children, and the disabled. Tender for lift construction will only called when most of the apartments in a specific polls 70% agreed for upgrading.

Overview

Singapore is a small country with a limited land area of 700 square kilometers and a population of 4 millions, meaning it is inevitable that most of the people have to live in high-rise apartments and work in high-rise commercial and industrial buildings. Therefore, elevators, escalators and moving walks have become a very important part of day-to-day life to enhance the vertical transportation industry in Singapore, neighboring countries and the rest of the world, as well.

The HDB started the Lift Telemonitoring System (TMS) in 1984 to monitor lifts in the high-rise public housing estates. To date, more than 20,000 lifts are monitored by the system. TMS uses SCADA technology to monitor real-time status of the lifts, such as breakdown and passenger trapped. from a centralised Master Station. The lift maintenance companies are automatically notified of any problem and in most cases, repairs are carried out even before a complaint is received. The introduction of TMS has resulted in better lift performance as historical data allowed HDB to pinpoint problem areas and improve the method of maintenance. Besides detecting problems with the lifts, TMS can also be used to carry out remote testing of lifts and other emergency standby equipment.

The HDB has started to build more apartment blocks that are more than 30-storey buildings. For residents to enjoy this trend, the existing elevator specification and designs such as speed, central system and hoist way equipment, will have to be changed to ensure better elevator ride, comfort and safety for elevator manufacturers to design, supply and install higher speed and more sophisticated types of lifts in HDB estates.

The government of Singapore is in the process of renovating the older public housing estates. All elevators installed with staged landings are to be changed so they stop at all floors to cater to a faster moving population. The older, conventional relay controlled type would be replaced by new generation lifts with microprocessor control of elevators. The government estimated that S$5 billions would be spent on the upgrading of elevators over the next decade.

Lift Elevator Safety

New modern elevators are designed to be fail-safe and user-friendly to prevent accidents. The Singapore Lift and Escalator Contractors and Manufacturers Association (SLECMA) have convened a safety committee to create awareness in the usage of elevators and escalators.

• Prevent any part of the passenger from danger at the leading edges.
• Prevent closing of elevator doors when passengers approach, stand near or at the door edge, even from a flat angle.
  • 2.5 cm from lift cabin.
  • 3.0 cm from lift lobby.
  • 50 cm for door horizontal sensing.
  • 1.8 m for door vertical sensing.
• Should not fail if any fail-safe related to safety device fails.
• Response time of the sensing device should be less than 50 milliseconds.
• Stopping time of the door should be less than 200 milliseconds.
• The voice & motor noise within control requirements.
• Smoke Control
• Reliability of Electrical Power Supply
• Effects of Fire
• Effects of Water
• Effects of Electro-Radiation

Environmental & Health issues

Elevators and escalators are driven by electric motors. The nature of these efficient motors is that when they start up they use minimum power and consequently, are at their weakest when the elevator cabin is empty. As the passenger load increases the motor draws more electric current to increase its power so that it can lift the cabin much faster. The motor sparks increase proportionately to the greater electrical current being drawn. The sparks created are not needed for the motor to function. Both A.C. and D.C. motors spark. The D.C. elevator motors are built not to spark, but after several years of usage and wear they create sparks when in use.

Much like solenoids, electric motors create magnetic vector potentials which cannot be shielded completely. Any charged particle passing through a magnetic vector potential will experience a phase shift, despite the magnetic field being minimal, or zero, in the region through which the particle passes. Electric motors contain multiple coils which all produce powerful magnetic fields and, most importantly, magnetic vector potentials.

Elevator rooms, boiler rooms, electric street-cars, trains along with transformers and generators are all common sources of powerful magnetic vector potentials, and quantum phase shifting field. Example a electric sub-station transformers which supplied electricity up to 300-500 households, the magnetic potentials impose a phase shift on the electrons found in the electric metals which electric motors broadcast massive magnetic vector spikes which disturbed the natural balance in substation. Hence they need to have a safety distance of minimum 80 feet up to 160 feet depend on the location & material used to shield the EMF.

Usually it is difficult to state that a specific electric implement from a specific manufacturer is permitted. The reasons are first, that even the same manufacturer often changes the design of his product and secondly, a mechanic repairing it could make a change that would change its EMF status. It is also one of the reasons why urban city had a high risk of cancers with all the increasing electrical appliances around our daily life.

External links

• Lift Upgrading Programme
• EMF & Real Estate Issues