November
2005
ELEVåTOR WÅRLD
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Cover Story: The Fulbright Tower Renovation . . . Page 64
Wuhan on the Yangtze’s Building Boom . . . Page 74
More on Emergency Elevator Evacuation . . . Page 103
The Istanbul Kanyon Project . . . Page 109
Schindler China Opens Escalator Plant . . . Page 114
www.elevator-world.com
Project Spotlight
Fulbright
Tower
by Daren Correll and Clint Spencer
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Escalator architecture
in the Fulbright Tower
lobby
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Newly painted machines
in the machine room
In 1836, two brothers, John and Augustus Allen, paid US$1.40 per acre for 6,642
acres of land near Buffalo Bayou, Texas. Today, those acres are home to one of the
world’s busiest seaports and the fourth-largest city in the U.S. – Houston, Texas.
Despite some setbacks along the way, including a hurricane that destroyed much of
Galveston Island and killed over 6,000 people in 1900, and tropical storm Allison, the floodwaters of which did US$5 billion damage in 2001, Houston has prospered. Long a city
where affluence had risen or fallen with the fortunes of the oil industry, Houston is now a
major U.S. economic force driven by the energy, technology and healthcare sectors.
The Houston area is home to many well-known landmarks, including the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center (established in 1961)
and the Astrodome, heralded as the “Eighth Wonder of the World” when it was built
in 1965. Today, new city landmarks include the Hobby Center for Performing Arts,
Minute Maid Park and Reliant Stadium (home to the “Astros” baseball team and “Texans” football team respectively) and
Elevator landing ▼
Toyota Center, the new downtown
arena for the Houston Rockets
National Basketball Association
(NBA) franchise.
Toyota Center is just one of the
newer elements of a vibrant downtown. Houston’s 10 tallest high-rise
buildings, constructed from 1971 to
1987, have made a major contribution to the city’s impressive skyline.
One of these 10 is the 51-floor, 1.2million-square-foot, Class A Fulbright Tower.
Fulbright Tower is a sculpted, 23year-old skyscraper that, until recently, was known as Chevron
Tower. Renamed for its major tenant,
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▲ Fulbright Tower
international law firm Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P., the
building is owned by Crescent 1301 McKinney, L.P.
Fulbright & Jaworski have occupied more than 350,000
square feet in the tower since locating there in 1985.
After serving for many years, the Fulbright Tower elevators needed major renovation to keep pace with today’s
accelerated environment. Amtech Elevator Houston and
Motion Control Engineering, Inc. (MCE) of Rancho Cordova,
California accepted the challenge, beginning a 21-month modernization project involving 29 elevators. The project included four banks of six passenger elevators, two service elevators, two parking elevators and one executive car. To meet the demands of the
task, iControl technology from MCE was specified.
Working with elevator consultant John Gilbert of Persohn/Hahn Associates, the companies determined to use MCE iControl DC elevator controllers coupled to Otis gearless
machines. The 32-horsepower Otis 131-HT machines and 50-horsepower 139-HT
machines were used for low- and mid-rise cars (running at 500fpm and 700fpm
respectively). The 72-horsepower and 86-horsepower Otis 219-HT machines powered
mid-rise and high-rise cars at 1,000fpm and 1,200fpm respectively.
MCE personnel spent many weeks at the installation site, working with building
management, consultant Bruce Barbre of Barbre Consulting, Inc. and installation experts to understand and respond to the requirements and issues unique to the building’s aging traction elevator system. In some cases, the engineers modified real-time
operating software, so that if similar issues were encountered in future installations, a
simple parameter setting would easily accommodate them. Updating software in older
controllers can be a time-consuming process involving Read-Only Memory chip “burning,” shipping delays and firmware replacement. The control architecture simplifies this
process greatly, allowing code changes to be sent to the site over high-speed Internet
connections and quickly uploaded.
These “real-time” upgrades were facilitated by a Windows PC-based graphical user
interface that provides remote, in-depth, real-time diagnostic and adjustment capability. This technology allowed the
design engineers to work with installers and adjusters “hands-on and
side-by-side” to diagnose problems
or make sophisticated adjustments
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Fulbright
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Tower
Amtech maintenance engineer
Jeff Lamb monitors readings on
iControl’s iBox processor
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Continued
immediately, even though the engineers were at their
desks nearly 2,000 miles away.
Access was key to the relative speed and ease of
the installation. Throughout the job, engineers and
R&D personnel were able to see what they were
doing live, without barriers. All this required was Internet access. Engineers could then look up the faultevent log of any car on the system, see it live and
make adjustments remotely.
Throughout the installation process, Amtech installers had direct access to factory engineers, whose
frequent presence was dictated by the newness of the
technology itself, nuances in the building design and
conditions uncovered during renovation.
Project challenges, including settling of the steel
infrastructure that caused the elevator rails to move
out of alignment, led to several design innovations.
For example, high-speed elevator runs on legacy
tracks caused the hard-rubber following wheels of
Detail
of
car-top
box
the landing system to produce unacceptable noise,
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leading to the introduction of a larger, softer wheel. The car-top landing and position-encoding system used with the elevators was one of the keys to installation
speed and simplicity – the system requires no hoistway tape or vanes, has few moving parts and is virtually maintenance free.
The door operators used to replace
the aging mechanical technology of
the originals benefited from several
major modifications affecting both
hardware and software as the project
took shape, moving them from “rev 4”
Fulbright
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▲ SmarTraq door operator
iLand landing system ▲
to “rev 5” release level and improving their performance and reliability. Improvements
included incorporating one-inch conduit connections to simplify installation, isolating
logic power to improve noise-rejection capabilities and the implementation of more sophisticated component clocking and even high-level operating software revisions.
Ultimately, the project proved both a learning experience and a great success. The
group dispatchers efficiently coordinated system response to building traffic, and the
Otis gearless machines and individual elevator controllers delivered powerful acceleration, smooth high-speed runs and sophisticated operating characteristics. The networked architecture linking elevator controllers and group dispatching systems
throughout the structure allowed an entire bank of existing monitoring stations to be
replaced using a single, 20-inch flat-screen monitoring station running monitoring software. The monitor provides real-time status display of elevator groups and/or individual cars, and also offers appropriate dispatching control access and in-depth control of
elevator security features.
Fulbright Tower’s vertical transport system is state of the art, ASME A17.1-2000 compliant and ready to provide its next 25 years of quality service for building tenants. Daren Correll is marketing manager and Clint Spencer is a technical writer for Motion Control
Engineering. The photos here were taken by Rod Weeks, senior engineer for MCE’s R&D department.
Tower
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