On Monday, SpaceX announced that it would be holding a Hyperloop pod competition, inviting universities and private companies to build passenger pods based on SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's open sourced Hyperloop design. The company said it would build a one-mile test track for the pods on a lot adjacent to its Hawthorne, California headquarters.
The Hyperloop has been described as high speed rail combined with an air hockey table: in the system, human-sized pods are propelled by linear induction, with magnets on the outside of the pod repelling the magnets lining the track, which is enclosed in a low-pressure tube (to reduce drag on the pods). The system is supposed to move humans and cargo at a rate of 760 miles per hour.
The impetus for the idea was Musk's disapproval of California's attempts to build a high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Musk detailed this in a 58-page document in 2013 (PDF), claiming that his Hyperloop idea could be built over the same stretch of land as California High Speed rail but for just $6 billion. (California's train system was estimated to cost around $68 billion as of this January.) But Musk decided to step back from the Hyperloop idea as soon as he put it forward. He made his designs open source and publicly said that neither SpaceX nor Tesla Motors, his electric vehicle company, would be building a Hyperloop.
Is a 1 mile long track long enough to test a train that goes 760 miles per hour?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tibman on Wednesday June 17 2015, @02:08PM
338 m/s is making love with the sound barrier : ) I haven't looked into the hyperloop but this would be a fantastic engineering challenge for a university team.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 17 2015, @02:44PM
I think there's some errors in my calculations. But the ballpark figure that they won't reach maximum design speed for a full scale track is probably right. One might also wonder how braking will be done. I wouldn't rely solely on linear motors to do that job. A power switch failure at a critical time might turn the pod(s) into a bullet that will reshape any end station [theoldmotor.com].
(1895 Paris [wikipedia.org])
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 17 2015, @03:10PM
Wouldn't a loop track make far more sense for testing purposes? So no end station, just a loading/unloading segment, and if they overshoot they keep going in circles until they coast to a stop or the power comes back on.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday June 17 2015, @03:26PM
I do like the idea of a failure mode that is basically a decelerating loop.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.