Components being tested can expect to be strapped routinely to a vibrating "shaker table," then subjected to heat reaching 400 degrees Fahrenheit and cold as low as minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit. These torture tests - and many others like them - keep going until the parts fail.

This "testing to failure" demonstrates parts' weaknesses so researchers can refine and redesign them. To qualify to be in an Otis elevator or escalator, parts have to set world-class records for endurance.

The Otis Research Center, featuring a 29-story test tower and Quality Assurance Center in Bristol, Conn., is one of Otis' worldwide facilities that test the company's elevators and escalators and their components in simulated real-world environments.

Otis tests the components to their limits, whether it's sending an elevator car up and down (and up and down and up and down) a 300-foot hoistway, or shaft, or deliberately corroding a microprocessor in a salt-fog chamber, a test that mimics conditions of a coastal environment.

Every aspect of an elevator's and escalator's performance is tested to ensure safety and quality. As the industry leader, Otis' reputation depends on the performance of its products.

Among other things, Otis tests help ensure that electronic components will survive lightning strikes and brownouts, that dust doesn't interfere with the controls, that electro-static discharge doesn't damage equipment, and that products can survive a bumpy transport to their installation sites.

The benefits of all this testing are unmistakable. Claudia Schmidt-Milkau, Otis director of worldwide product and process quality, says, "There are fewer problems in the field because our improved qualification methods and technical test equipment have contributed to more reliable products and technology."

While components are being tested at the Quality Assurance Center, elevator car (or cab) prototypes are actually dropped down the hoistway at the test tower in a free fall - just to make sure that the governor senses the car speed and initiates the car safety device to stop the elevator safely. Finally, specialists called ride-quality engineers ride the elevators to measure vibration, noise and acceleration.

If you were to step inside the Research Center, here's what you would see:

• 14 different hoistways displaying various elevator designs.
• A 25-foot high NextStep™ escalator, Otis' newest escalator design.
• Numerous quality testing chambers, simulating environments with extreme salt, dust, heat, cold, humidity, electrical stress and accelerated stress testing.
• An electromagnetic interference testing room.

Otis is developing computer-based tools to supplement the physical testing that goes on in the Research Center using a procedure called modeling, analysis, simulation and computation (MASC). Otis experts say that one challenge in elevator and escalator design is ensuring consistent performance over the wide range of installations - from a skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur to an airport in Detroit to an apartment house in Vienna.

Engineers develop physics-based equations of the elevator and escalator dynamics that are turned into computer models that predict system behavior. These models are used for evaluating concepts, performing tradeoff studies, optimizing designs and reducing physical testing and product development time.

For some, this is the most exciting and demanding part of the process.

Randy Roberts, manager of modeling and simulation, says, "Anytime you can predict something and be able to say, 'I expected that to happen,' is a pretty cool thing. There will always be a need to develop physical prototypes in product development. With MASC we'd like to reduce and focus these efforts using virtual prototyping with computer models."

Isabel Hovey, director of the Otis Engineering Center in Farmington, agrees. "In the hoistway you get to see your ideas actually in motion, free of all the problems that you fixed. I think this is why people are engineers, so that they can see their products in real life."

In some ways, the Research Center is a few steps ahead of time. The bending fatigue tester bends belts and cables to simulate elevator movement. After five to six weeks, three million cycles are completed - equivalent to about 20 years of normal use.

At Otis engineering centers around the world, researchers analyze the tests performed at the quality center and test tower. They also brainstorm ways to reinvent the elevator and escalator, keeping Otis at the cutting edge of innovation.

Their creativity and persistence led to the development of both the NextStep™ escalator and the Gen2™ elevator system.

The NextStep escalator, a breakthrough global product from Otis that employs a unique Guarded™ step design, underwent extensive testing and modeling before it was released for sale this year. The product's new features mark a comprehensive advance in escalator technology and safety.

The Gen2 system, a revolutionary elevator design unique to Otis, uses flat, polyurethane-coated steel belts instead of rounded cables. The belts are flexible enough to wrap around a very small diameter of a drive sheave (the grooved wheel over which the hoist ropes pass and by which motion is imparted to the car).

This allows for the biggest innovation of all: the "machine," which is the power unit that furnishes the energy necessary to raise and lower an elevator, is actually inside the hoistway. This eliminates the large machine room common to most elevators.

A peek inside the elevator door of the Gen2 system unveils a whole world of inner-workings. A six-foot column of blinking lights buzzing along microprocessors is to the right of the elevator door. The tiny controllers direct car position, speed, energy use, door opening, and direction.

"A lot of people think an elevator is just a box with some cables attached, but it's a lot more than that," says Ken Woronoff, manager of the test tower. The work of the Otis Research Center demonstrates this daily.