Description
Portland Tower, also known as St. Andrew's House, is one of the most prominent high rise commercial buildings in Manchester City centre, providing commercial office space to various institutions. The tower, finished in 1962, was one of the first of the high-rise buildings built in the 1960s and 1970s across the United Kingdom in the brutalist style, which often emphasizes concrete as a structural medium with repetitive angular geometries. Portland Tower has recently undergone a facelift in the context of the currently undergoing major re-generation of Manchester's City Centre.
ANSA Elevators Ltd, a leading lift engineering and service company in the North of England, was awarded a contract for the modernisation of Portland tower four lift systems, and selected Wittur to provide most components for this major project.
The four lifts feature a rated load of 1360 Kg. servicing 22 floors with a total travel of 75 metres.
ANSA carefully planned the upgrade liaising closely with the client and Wittur, using an innovative approach to be able to modernise one lift system at a time, while retaining the other three lifts in operation.
Wittur Limited fully supported ANSA Elevators for this innovative solution, which includes an overlay control system, modernisation of existing Schindler QKS 9 landing door system with complete new car mounted operators and new gearless main drive machines from Wittur Electric Drives.
Phase I of the project retained all existing landing doors and mechanism, whilst producing specifically designed car door operators based on Wittur AMD modular design, with bespoke door panel adapters and couplers. The high adaptation capability of AMD meant that car door panels and sill could also be retained. New Landing and Car Operating Stations were installed and connected to the overlay control system.
In the machine room, two Wittur WSG 19.4 gearless drives with new bedplates took the place of two of the existing Schindler lift traction machines. The advanced electro-magnetic design of these traction machines provided reduced power consumption and high efficiency, and enabled the conversion of the existing double wrap arrangement to a single wrap configuration while retaining the set speed of 3.5 m/s.
Phase II is planned for Q1 2011, when the second pair of lifts in the system will be completely modernised in the same manner with the final two remaining old drive machines in the machine room will be removed and disposed of.
John Bentley, the Managing Director of ANSA Elevators Ltd, is pleased with the results:
“…The capability to provide comprehensive lift modernisation with minimal customer impact has resulted in a massive improvement in traffic movement in a building where lift service is crucial to the client. It is consistent with ANSA’s commitment to providing customer–focused sustainable solutions”.