Evaluation and renovation of existing passenger lifts and their safety level improvements

This thesis examines the development of elevator lift standards and history of the elevator industry in Turkey, with special emphasis on existing safety standards and audit reports for elevator construction today. Additionally, an examination of the required elevator controls will be carried out in order to list the conditions needed to have a sufficient measurement of safety. This analysis will be used to explore the difficulties experienced in auditing and find new ways to achieve more accurate results. First, the concept of accessibility and subsequent creation of compliance standards in elevators that led to periodic maintenance audits will be observed. Afterwards, the necessary standards following assembly and periodic elevator maintenance inspections were also observed. Audits contribute to the quality of the elevator industry and play a major role in developing the industry overall. However, a different approach in examining audits is presented in this thesis to determine whether or not elevator audits currently used are sufficiently adequate. The main subject of this thesis is to provide an alternative assessment scale from the audit risk assessment that is detailed further in Chapter 5. To support this premise, a reworking of existing standards listed in Safety Norms for Existing Lifts' (SNEL) Article 74 and Turkish Standards Institution's (TSE) audit table will be studied and compared in order to create a new set of elevator safety level standards. Many of Turkey's elevators were built 10, 20, or 30 years ago, and were constructed in compliance with much different safety protocols than those built today. This is a major motivation for updating safety standards currently utilized in the elevator industry today. Superior inspection organizations utilize a 3-stage colour system (red, yellow, and green) for labelling elevator system weaknesses, a system that will be examined and critiqued in this thesis. The differences between the green, yellow, and red signifiers used for reporting elevator quality and performance is not an exact science and the need for a more precise technique is highlighted. Any labels attributed to elevators should be able to provide unambiguous intermediate values. If the elevator has 2 red tags, and another elevator has 20 red tags, then both elevators shouldn't be labelled as 'red' in accordance to the 3-stage colour system; instead, there should be a numerical system generated in such a way that gives a clear distinction between the levels of difference. The evaluation of standard tags were also subjected to rating according to differences in interpretations, and could be used to explain the necessary points or evaluations that a scoring system (i.e. the different levels of red) needed in order to be able to work without endangering human lives. In the proposed, alternative scoring system, if an elevator has 150 penalty points, but no red tags, then it will be in a different category from an elevator that is red-tagged with 15 penalty points. In this case, elevator quality standards will be dependent on both its performance and industry assessment, and presented in a matter where safety levels are clearly visible. With the existing red label scoring system, there is a shortfall of sufficient safety measures due to the fact that 80% of elevators in the industry were considered unsafe. Such a problematic situation requires immediate decisions and actions, but this extraordinary circumstance did not drum up much support in creating an action plan or other leadership from the Ministry of Science, Industry, and Technology. This thesis can be later interpreted by the elevator sector in self-evaluating itself better and accurately assessing where they stand within the industry.