A European capsule, designed to travel at speeds of more than 600mph per hour through reduced-pressure tubes, has taken second place in an international competition launched by SpaceX.
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.
Unlike the capsules designed by most other teams, the TU Delft design uses permanent magnets to allow the vehicle to hover approximately two centimetres above the track, as it moves over a conductive plate, according to team captain Tim Houter.
“In a full-scale, commercial system, the capsule would accelerate out of the station using a linear electric motor, with the stator windings inside the track,” he said. “Then because there is not much air inside the tube, it would just float along at very high speed, with only an extra boost needed on the way to stay at that speed, and then at the station you would decelerate your Hyperloop vehicle,” said Houter.
Energy would be recovered using regenerative braking, he said.
“This makes it a very energy efficient system,” he added.
Solar panels on top of the tubes themselves could generate additional energy to power the capsules.
In the next stage of the competition, the half-scale capsules will race around a 1.6km test reduced-pressure tube, which is to be constructed next to SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
I really want to see this succeed. It does seem vulnerable to vandalism – take one bulldozer (or driverless car?), smash into and hole the tube, everything stops. How much time will it take to re-evacuate hundreds of miles of tube? Will there be pressure doors to limit the effect?
I seem to recall reading of a proposal to use this technology for crossing the Atlantic, the buoyant tube being tethered to sea floor well below the effect of waves or ships hulls. Extremely high speeds were postulated because of the absence of wind resistance in the tube. Linear motors, magnetic levitation and transport in tubes are not exactly new concepts.
I don’t get how a bunch of students is suddenly qualified to design something that has never been done before with no experience of magnetic suspension and high speed guidance problems. Delft is the best at solar cars, hpvs and human powered subs but this is rather different.