A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team has placed first in the design phase of SpaceX's Hyperloop competition. 115 teams submitted designs, and 22 teams will be able to test their designs on a 1.5 km test track during the summer:
Designs for passenger pods that could travel through airless tubes have been revealed by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Hyperloop is a conceptual transport system in which passenger pods could be fired through vacuum tubes at more than 600mph (1,000km/h). The MIT team came first in a SpaceX competition to design pods that could be tested in a prototype tube. The team will now have the opportunity to build and test its design in the US.
Elon Musk - the entrepreneur behind companies such as Paypal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors - announced his vision for a Hyperloop transport system in August 2013. Although SpaceX is not developing its own commercial Hyperloop, the company says it wants to "accelerate development" of the idea and is building a mile-long test track in California. The winning entries in the company's design competition will now have the opportunity to test them in full-scale tubes over the summer.
Previously:
SpaceX will hold a Hyperloop Pod Competition in 2016
Three Tracks Planned to Test 'Hyperloop' Transportation Idea
Related Stories
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?
Original Submission
It's a race befitting the goal of moving passengers and cargo at the speed of sound: Three Southern California companies are building separate test tracks to see how well the "hyperloop" transportation concept works in the real world.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk breathed life into the hyperloop in 2013, when he proposed a network of elevated tubes to transport specially designed capsules over long distances. Top speed: about 750 mph.
Though momentum to build a hyperloop has been growing since, the concept dates back decades.
Capsules would float on a thin cushion of air and use magnetic attraction[sic] and solar power to zoom through nearly airless tubes. With little wind resistance, they could make the 400-mile trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in about a half-hour. Musk has said that while he does not plan to develop the hyperloop commercially, he wants to accelerate its development.
On Tuesday, his SpaceX rocket launching firm said global infrastructure firm AECOM would build a one-mile track at SpaceX headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport.
If all goes well, by summer's end, the track will host prototype capsules that emerge from a design competition this weekend at Texas A&M University. The prototype pods would be half the size of the system that Musk envisioned and would not carry people.
Hyperloop, the transportation technology associated with Elon Musk, could be coming to Europe instead of California:
The Hyperloop could easily become the next big thing after bullet trains. It's a tube-based transportation system, in which pressurized passenger pods are accelerated through reduced-pressure tubes, which enables them to develop speeds as high as 760 miles per hour.
[...] While resolving technical issues was just a matter of time, crossing the red-tape sea in the U.S. forced one of the companies competing to make the Hyperloop a reality — Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, or HTT — to consider building their futuristic transportation pod in Slovakia, at the center of Europe. Just a few weeks ago, HTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn announced that his company has reached an agreement with the Slovakian government. Their plan is to establish the Hyperloop transportation route from Vienna to Bratislava, Slovakia, and from Bratislava to Budapest, Hungary. It normally takes about eight hours to travel from Košice, Slovakia, to Vienna to Budapest. But it's only 43 minutes with the Hyperloop.
[...] In an interview with Vice, HTT Chief Operating Officer Bibop G. Gresta said the initial feasibility study showed that the Hyperloop pod could transport up to 10 million people a year [in California]. The biggest challenges, he said, are politics and regulation.
Previously: The Race to Create Elon Musk's Hyperloop Heats Up
Three Tracks Planned to Test 'Hyperloop' Transportation Idea
MIT Design Wins SpaceX Hyperloop Design Competition
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday February 05 2016, @02:17PM
Why not push the vehicles along with air, rather than go to the trouble of maintaining a vacuum?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @02:57PM
Air resistance
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Friday February 05 2016, @10:20PM
Exactly. The drag for objects traveling that fast is immense. Reducing the air pressure is best way to reduce the drag and save energy. At the same time some air is useful because they can shape the vehicle in a way to use the air to create lift, thus removing the need to levitate the vehicle in addition to moving it along the track. The list doesn't have to be much, in fact it should only be few inches to ensure the wheels are not in contact with the surface, but not enough for it to bump itself against the ceiling of the tube.
It is a genius design, just not one genius. Such a design has been thought of through-out history, we just didn't have the capability to really try it till now.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 05 2016, @03:02PM
The whooooosh is bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Theory_and_operation [wikipedia.org]
It's best described as a semi-vacuum, because there is still some air pressure. It would also work well on Mars, due to the low density of Mars's atmosphere.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday February 05 2016, @03:18PM
Were you envisioning a particular way of doing so? Pumping air in at the station to push the car all the way to the destination, like them old-timey message tubes? (or like the escape route in The Living Daylights)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @03:39PM
"Old-timey"?? Don't you mean futuristic [theinfosphere.org]?
(Score: 1) by YeaWhatevs on Friday February 05 2016, @04:01PM
Yea that's pretty much it. Don't forget it draws air from the other side too, but only enough so that you can use it as controlled air brakes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Friday February 05 2016, @04:17PM
I guess (uninformedly) that the main objection to a plan like that is that you're going to waste a lot of energy compressing and moving air, when the kinetic energy of the car could be increased by much more direct means.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 06 2016, @02:48AM
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pneumatic_Dispatch_-_Figure_7.png [wikimedia.org]
(Score: 1) by linkdude64 on Friday February 05 2016, @04:12PM
Easy fix. If they're using a vacuum just move the hose to the exhaust port and it should blow them just fine.
(posting with no karma bonus for this one)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @08:37PM
(waits for someone to run some sizing calcs for required compressor power)
Suggest using 1000kg for the capsule/car mass so it is large enough to carry some people, along with the life support required to keep the people breathing and otherwise comfortable inside the evacuated tube.