Reliable lift drives are critical for ensuring smooth, safe and efficient vertical transportation in buildings of all sizes. From maintaining ride comfort to reducing downtime and long-term maintenance costs, selecting the right drive can make all the difference. Here, we sit down with Brian Preston, global business manager – elevator at CP Automation, to discuss the challenges in lift applications and explore the upcoming drive technology setting new standards.

What are the challenges when selecting and installing lift drives?

Lift drive requirements are significantly different from standard industrial drives. In a typical drive application, the focus is on efficiency and basic load handling. However, in lifts, drives must deliver high peak current per kilowatt, accelerate and decelerate widely varying loads smoothly and enable safe transportation for passengers. A drive that provides optimal comfort for passengers, can perform reliably under all load conditions, while also being easy to install and configure is the ideal combination for lift applications.

In addition to the above, building owners have additional needs and value reliability and long-term maintainability and, for example, look for the drive to be pro-active in predicting component failure so its replacement can be scheduled as part of a planned maintenance visit, rather than wait for the failure to occur, leading to an outage.

For lift control system manufacturers, additional requirements also include software and hardware benefits that help reduce the number of stocked product lines, eliminate components such as RFI filters and motor contactors, reduce cost and free up panel space.