A team of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology has won a competition to design a Hyperloop pod.
The Hyperloop is an alternative high-speed transport system proposed in 2013 by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. The idea involves large reduced pressure tubes between cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco allowing pods to travel back and forth at speeds of up to 600 km/h.
Musk and SpaceX launched a competition last year to design a pod with more than 100 teams entering.
The MIT team won the best overall design award and they, with another 21 teams, have been invited to California later this year to test their designs on a Hyperloop test track
Team captain Philippe Kirschen said, with strengths in aeronautics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, the MIT Hyperloop Team focused on speed, braking, stability, and levitation.
For the latter problem, they developed a model for electrodynamic suspension that relies on powerful magnets placed over a conducting plate, which in this case is the aluminum track SpaceX is building. The magnets generate lift.
“The beauty of the system we designed is that it’s completely passive, an elegant property that will make our pod very scalable,” said Kirschen.
Their final capsule came in at roughly 2.5 m long, about 1 m wide, and weighing 250 kg. Kirschen says it has the aerodynamic feel of a bobsled.
As they now prepare for actual testing, they are moving from simulations to aluminum and carbon fibre, trying out braking systems, and testing dangerously strong magnets. Final assembly must be complete by mid-May.
“Ideally, it will reach a speed in excess of 100 m/s,” Kirschen says. There will be no passengers on board for the 20 second inaugural run.
Other teams to win awards included the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of California Irvine, Virginia Tech and Delft University of Technology from the Netherlands.
The winning design. Image: MIT Hyperloop team.