Elevators ensure transportation of people inside buildings and increase
their life quality. High-rise buildings whose number is increasingly going up
today has one or more elevator cabs to provide vertical transportation. A great
number of people use elevators in many buildings such as business centres,
hotels, hospitals and shopping centres daily. It is highly essential for the
elevators used by many people daily to operate constantly. In the event of
sudden failure of elevators during operation, people inside them face with a
tough situation. Also, people have difficulty during the maintenance-repair
period of elevators. Elevator system has counterweight system in order to
balance the weight of elevator cab. A guide-rail system has been developed to
limit the movements of elevator cab and counterweights on horizontal axis. When
an elevator system is operational, cab and counterweight system move reversely.
The common failures in elevators are usually seen in the components such as
elevator guide-rail system, ropes and motors.
In this study, a system based on image processing has been developed in
order to prevent wear on guide-rail surface in elevators. In the proposed
method, real-time condition monitoring is performed by cameras using built-in
system. The images of elevator guide-rail surface are captured via four digital
cameras fixed onto elevator cab. The image-processing methods are applied on
the images captured by cameras and hence the wears on the surface of guide-rails
are detected. The surface of guide-rail is firstly detected in the proposed
method. Then, image segmentation and mathematical morphology are applied on the
image of guide-rail surface and the wears on the surface of rail are detected.
The failure extent of the wear failures detected are calculated. By processing
the images captured by four cameras during movement of elevator, the results
for surface of guide-rails are obtained. Using these results, reporting is
performed. An elevator prototype has been created in order to carry out tests
for development of the proposed method. The tests have been conducted by fixing
the built-in system and cameras onto this elevator prototype. It is
considerably advantageous to detect the failures on elevator guide-rails
through image-processing methods. Following a literature review, it is seen
that the proposed method is a new approach.
Subjects | Engineering |
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Journal Section | Research Article |
Authors | |
Publication Date | December 1, 2016 |
Published in Issue | Year 2016 Special Issue (2016) |