Winch With Dual Drives

I would like to have one with 2 motors to build a small elevator in my home. Wtih 2 drives if one burnt out the other it would give me time to prepare for the elevator to be down for repairs. Plus it would give me a better feeling of saftey going up to the 3rd floor.

I don't know about winches but in many other applications you need some sort of torque control to link the two drives to insure that they will share the load. Most modern drives will have this functionality. One of the drives is the master and operate in speed mode. Its torque is measured and transfered to the other drives to help pulling the load. To add safety, the speed reference is often sent to the slave drives and a window detector is used to generate an alarm if the slave drives are over-speeding or stalling.

Talk to a drive manufacturer specialized in line drives.

Is your skip hoist AC or DC? i.e. a mobile or an industrial application? (I've just looked up Conical rotor motors. I suppose you are referring to AC drives)

Either way I would expect that a single drive for two motors will not work because you will get different slippage (both mechanically and electrically) on each motor. If you use stepper motors or position sensing controls and your drum will not allow cables to override each other then it may work.

Marcot's response makes sense but is your skip and its contents evenly balanced? Load sharing will not be a possibility if they are unbalanced. You will have the choice of manual control or a find a means of measuring the line lengths drawn in. We use manual control for yacht dinghies which are usually much heavier at the stern than the bow.

Are chains a possibility? This would give a guaranteed line input /rev. Couple this with a single shaft and you will know that the load will rise evenly.

I looked at a couple of sites and it seems that most manufacturers of brake motors, with their obvious hoisting applications offer design services. Why not ask them for some input? Ask several so that you're not steered into a system convenient to that particular manufacturer.

Best of luck and come back with the solution you finally adopt.

Chas