Your freedom of Vertical Living​
Few years ago I was building my
family summer home in my birth-
country – Armenia. I wanted my
parents to stay in our home. The
problem was that all the bedrooms
were located on the second floor, which would require my parents to go up and down the stairs quite often. Considering their age and related health issues, It was challenging for my parents to fully use the upstairs and downstairs. Hence I started looking for commercial elevator to buy and install in our home. After searching for existing home elevator products, I realized that the market lacks an elegant, safe and convenient solution for home elevators and this market niche is practically empty. All solutions were poorly echoing commercial models, which are neither “personal”, nor “compact”, nor “quiet”, and nor “elegant”.
One day a memory suddenly flashed in front of my eyes – recalled years back walking the isles of Costco warehouse and seeing a cashier inserting checks and cash into a capsule, which then was being shot up through a vacuum tube – off to the central office for collection. Voilà, that’s it! Your subconscious may surprise you sometimes.
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After having done some rough calculations on paper, it turned out that physics of the “vacuum elevator” should work, and it looked good, at least on paper.
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THE AIRLIFT STORY
(from the founder)
Started in a garage putting together a concept prototype
I have invited my friend, a mechanical engineer, to help me in the Proof of Concept for my elevator project. We put together a scaled-down concept-prototype of the elevator in my garage. It had full size footprint, but shorter cabin to fit in a 10 foot high shaft structure and have enough space to go up and down driven by vacuum.​
Soon we were lifting heavy weights of over 1000lbs with a vacuum tech without hick-ups. It worked, and it worked nicely! Once we achieved this milestone, we entered the next phase –building a full-scale technology prototype at our home.
The full scale prototype that we have built, was serving 4 floors - from the basement to the third floor. The beautiful staircase with elegant balusters opened up to the atrium, spanning three floors high and going around the elevator. Magnificent floor-to-ceiling glass panels of the elevator shaft became a display, an attraction point in our home.
This was truly beautiful but far from a mature technology. We used only off-the-shelf parts that were available on the market at the time. For electronics we used commercial PLCs that take sensor data and control the vacuum compressor and the doors. Very simple but sufficient for basic transportation. We knew that for a mature and elegant product we need full customization, but we did not have the money or the capacity to take on such an ambitious project at that time. The system was also lacking some of the safety features, as well as intelligence to detect subtle failure modes.​
Scaffold in the Hoistway is for safety of the installation crew, it was removed after the installation
Then we raised initial funds from our angel supporters and started the commercial phase of the project where we redesigned the AirLift ground-up with elegance, safety and manufacturability in mind. Once the mechanical design was completed, we rented a warehouse and acquired basic machinery. Then we established close relationships with about 100 manufacturing partners and started the official manufacturing phase of the project.
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After several months of intense work and after several iterations, we finally received thousands of standard and custom parts manufactured and delivered to our warehouse and ready to start assembly works.
​​The assembly phase was most fun but also most challenging due to many small surprises requiring redesign and refabrication of many parts due to tolerance and manufacturing errors, also design mistakes.
We faced several issues that required a solution:
- manufacturing errors requiring another manufacturing iteration
- tolerance errors. On some of the parts tolerance errors were exceeding our specification, so we had to relax our stringent requirements and redesign some parts allowing higher tolerance margins
- design mistakes which did not account for a full spectrum of mechanical forces projected on a part.
This was a result of certain assumptions that we made to relatively simplify the design process, which turned out to be false.
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To correct design mistakes we have purchased some basic manufacturing equipment and the fabrication of some parts went inhouse. Rapid prototyping philosophy was adopted that allowed us to disqualify some of the bad decisions we made during the design process.
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​The result of rapid prototyping was a proven and working parts and subassemblies. So, we fixed issues one by one and moved forward to the electronics integration.
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It is important to note that we rejected the idea of using commercial PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) and designed our own custom PLC that was tailored to AirLift functionality.
The complexity of the electronics subsystem of AirLift can be compared with electronics of modern cars. AirLift electronics includes about 50 PCB boards, all of which have their own CPU microchip and network interfaces to connect to the system.
Most of the PCB boards incorporate sensors to detect different states of the system and measure speed, weight, position, pressure and other characteristics to determine the conditions and states in which the system operates.
The data from sensors is then processed by a central controller and control commands are given to motors for operating the doors of the shaft and the cabin, to the vacuum compressor to determine the necessary pressure for vacuum operation, to control the lights and ventilation, also to control the safety mechanisms.
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The electronics system assumes redundancy, especially for safety mechanisms. For example, some of the sensor boards are duplicated in case a sensor malfunctions. Safety mechanisms are duplicated both in mechanics, as well as in electronics, practically reducing to zero the probability of failure of safety features.
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The system is designed to deliver a maximum safety and comfort to its users, whether during normal use, or even in case of emergency, like a sudden loss of vacuum or power outage. Never again be stuck in an elevator.
Putting together a commercial prototype
Blissera develops personal vacuum elevators for low-rise residential and commercial property. Our vacuum elevators are the safest, the most compact, the fastest, the smoothest, energy efficient, quiet, elegant and eco-friendly solution in your home or office.
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Your AirLift Team