TU Delft’s capsule concept judged most innovative design in Hyperloop competition

The concept capsule, designed by a team of students at TU Delft in the Netherlands, was also awarded the prize for the most innovative design in the Hyperloop competition.

The competition was established by SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk in 2015, in a bid to stimulate the development of the new form of transportation, which they have dubbed Hyperloop.

The system consists of a number of passenger capsules, which are designed to travel through tubes in a partial vacuum, with the lack of pressure allowing them to reach very high speeds. This could allow a Hyperloop capsule to travel between the outskirts of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area in around 35 minutes, for example.

The Delft team were one of 124 who presented their designs to a jury of researchers and experts from Tesla Motors and SpaceX in the first stage of the competition. They will now join 20 other teams in progressing through to the next stage, in which they will build a half-scale version of their capsule and test it on a track in California in the summer.