Safety Requires Quality - in China, too!: Page 4

It is extremely important that the performance values achieved in new condition are maintained over longer operating periods. If an elevator machine is located close to living space, distracting noises can cause complaints and follow-up costs. The people concerned will hardly accept the elevator becoming considerably louder after a relatively short operating period, when the agreeable noise behaviour of the new condition is lost. For example, safety brakes with simple elastomer damping can easily be mounted so that they achieve acceptable noise values in new condition; however, these values do not stay constant over an adequate service lifetime. On standard market brakes, a substantial increase in noise value can occur after only 100,000 switching actions. This service lifetime is utterly unacceptable in the field of elevator technology.

Among other things, it is not common knowledge that temperature influences the damping and noise behaviour. If the brake is energised over a long period of time, an operating temperature of approximately 60 °C is produced. This causes the rubber elements used for noise damping to expand, which improves the noise behaviour. Therefore, a brake at operating temperature does not cause problems during noise measurement. During product presentations, too, this makes it easier to present the noise behaviour of brakes as being considerably better than it probably will be in reality.

However, in the long run, such solutions will satisfy only a few customers. The experiences mentioned above have obviously already prevailed even in "new" markets such as China, so that some Chinese drive manufacturers have also begun to rely on quality products. Unfortunately, it cannot be ruled out that in addition to the certified quality products, reproductions are also used which do not offer the necessary reliability. Therefore, it is necessary to specify appropriate brakes and to make sure that these are actually used, for example by checking the Type tag. This ensures that the most important components offer the expected reliability. For more than 100 years, the name mayr has been vouching for quality; it is "your reliable partner" for safety brakes in elevators.