Posted by
michael
on from the fassssssssssssssssst dept.
Slack writes: "The Orlando Sentinal is reporting that China has signed a deal with a German consortium to build the world's first commercial train to float on magnetic fields."
Re:Transrapid still WAY too expensive
by
CSC
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· Score: 2
It could make short-distance air travel obselete on any
corridor where the maglev train is running.
That's what it did in France : air traffic between Paris and Lyon has been almost killed by the TGV, and companies flying Paris-Marseille are expecting a major loss starting next summer, when the high-speed line extension is completed.
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--
Colin
Re:These people are in a serious rush
by
gattaca
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· Score: 3
Soft boil an egg.
Birmingham has had Maglev for years
by
joe_fish
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· Score: 4
Not to knock the work being done in China, but they are not the first Maglev.
Re:Birmingham has had Maglev for years
by
PSC
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· Score: 2
Not to knock the work being done in China, but they are not the first Maglev.
Birmingham (UK) isn't the first maglev either. To quote from the Transrapid web site:
1979
Operation of the world's first maglev train with longstator propulsion (Transrapid 05) to be licensed for passenger transportation occurs at the International Transportation Exhibition (IVA 79) in Hamburg.
Check out the Transrapid web site (English and German) at transrapid.de
-- ---
The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
Not the first commercial Maglev - BHX
by
Avalonia
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· Score: 3
Birmingham Aiport (BHX) in the UK West Midlands sported a commercial operating Maglev between the terminal and the main-line railway station for eleven years. It has recently been replaced. There's a relevant Scientific American article here.
I just feel sorry for the poor bastards who dress gothic style and wear lots of metal. They're fine until the train starts up... then all of a sudden they're pinned to the floor the train wishing they'd never had those 15 nose-rings put in.
You'd think the magnetic fields would mess up electronics and other items that rely on magentic items wouldn't you? But have a think - power stations use electronics and computers don't they? They also have v.v.v.big magnets in the turbines/generators. So why don't their systems get corrupted?
Simple - insulation. Add wads of lead/concreate (okay, can't use that in this situation) or thick clumps of wires to help 'reduce' the magnetic fields.
Don't forget that the train itself will probably be computer controlled and the train company will have to take into account passengers with pacemakers (pacemakers and radio/magentic fields don't get on) - so don't worry about your laptop.
Slow, Old, Unsafe - pick any three
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3
The sound of self-interest and hypocrisy is nipping at my eardrums.
Let's start with self-interest.
Transrapid reckon this stuff is
Safe. Yeah, right. Until the power goes off
Energy efficient. Not unless you think squandering MW on keeping the levitation coils going is a good use of energy
Slow (or slower than the alternative) because for every small increase in speed you need a disproportionate increase in magnet current to keep the thing stable
Of course they have to say that because they have such a huge investment in old and essentially useless tech.
In fact, there is a magnetic levitation tech which is safe and energy efficient.
It relies on coils in the track (closed loops, unpowered) and magnets on the train.
The train has small wheels which it rides on until it reaches a critical velocity (around 30 km/h) above which the eddy-currents induced in the track coils generate enough of a repulsive force to lift the train.
Mount coils and magnets horizontally and vertically in sidewalls and you get to go around corners safely too.
The faster it goes, the more induced magnetism it generates, the more it holds itself stable
Propulsion is by some kind of small jet/fan.
Safety is assured because there is no electric current to get interrupted.
Check out Scientific American late last year for an article on this.
The hypocrisy comes from the Chinese (surprise!). How could this possible be a demonstration of China's technical prowess? A demonstration of Germany's perhaps, but not China's.
Re:Slow, Old, Unsafe - pick any three
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demonbug
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· Score: 2
Actually, they have done several tests of the Transrapid system where they abruptly shut off the power at high speed. The train(s) has rubber skids or wheels (I get confused between the German one and the Japanese one) that bring it safely to a stop.
I'm not sure about the energy efficiency of the Transrapid, but the Japanese maglev testbed uses superconducting magnets, and is very efficient. Only trouble is keeping the superconductors cool. I think the ones the Japanese use need to be around the temp of liquid CO2, which escapes me at the moment. The Transrapid, however, uses normal magnets.
Britain has two short maglev lines
by
Animats
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· Score: 2
One at Birmingham Airport and one at Gatwick. There used to be a third, in London, but it was replaced a few years ago because maintaining the one-of-a-kind system was too expensive.
Disney wanted to build a maglev from the Orlando airport to Disney World, bypassing all competing attractions in the area, but even Team Rodent couldn't get that through the Florida legislature.
Re:Transrapid still WAY too expensive
by
RayChuang
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· Score: 2
Actually, I do know that Eurostar has now nearly twice the people going between London and Paris as flying between London Heathrow/Gatwick and Paris/Charles de Gaulle airports. Eurostar is one reason why the hovercraft that used to ply the English Channel no longer do so.:(
The trip between London and Paris by Eurostar will be reduced by nearly 38 minutes when the new high-speed line from London's Waterloo International Station to Folkestone (the English side entrance to the tunnel) is completed in 2002.
Like the article said, there are serious concerns about the efects on local flora and fauna . . . and these will lead to human injuries
It can be expected to attract iron-rich plants, such as spinach. This in turn will attract cute little bunny rabbits. When the bunnies eat too much of the spinach, they will become stuck to the tracks.
With such easy targets, larger carnivores such as wolves and lions will be drawn to the area. After too many of these meals, they to will stick to the tracks, causing the train to derail.
Stop maglev now!
Oh, and think of the poor survivors, waiting for rescue, with no food but the spinach and bunnies. They'll have to shut off the electrical grid for half of Europe to unstick them from the tracks . . .
Spinach? Everyone knows that wabbits like _carrots!_
I can just imagine a modern Bugs Bunny - tunnelling all over China, pops up just as the train goes wooshing by, flattening his ears straight back behind him, and says, "I _knew_ I should've made that left toin at Albuquerque..."
Just then, a Chinese hunter comes by...
Re:Trains, planes and automobiles
by
bluGill
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· Score: 2
Woah there, don't forget that most electric power is generated via a heat to work conversion innitially. Add that factor in and things don't look quite as good.
Mind you large central generators are more efficcant then most engines, but there is also power line loss.
Likely Sequence of Events for a US Maglav
by
Catmeat
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· Score: 2
11 May 2015 Maglev connecting LA and San Francisco
opened to the public.
14 May 2015 Press Scare Stories about possible health effects of high intensity magnetic fields.
17 May 2015 First lawsuit against the maglev operating company by a person who claims it gave him brain cancer.
Re:Albert Speer with an epicanthic fold.
by
Bearpaw
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· Score: 2
Yeah! Next thing you know, they'll be indistinguishable from the US! (Well, ok, we don't have a Maoist gerontocracy...)
Boone, Iowa used to be a major rail center--three lines crossed there, or some such. Today, their rail preservation society (or whatever) operates what they claim is the last production built coal-fired steam engine--it was built in China.
So on weekends in spring and summer, you can go to the only stop, catch a ride on an honest-to-God steam engine, and leave smiling, but with flecks of coal all over your clothing . . .
Re:electromagnetic radiation
by
Lion-O
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· Score: 2
if there is a magnetic field, theres also and electric field
That doesn't have to be the case, it all depends on how you create the magnetic field. A magnetic field on its own doesn't have anything electrical about it unless you move a coil through the field. Then you are creating electricity, the principle of the dynamo. But thats pretty hard to compare with a mobile phone; thats a totally different story.
The next thing you are totally forgetting is Faraday. If you're inside a metal train then the electro magnetic fields generated by this train (remember; the tracks aka bottom of the train is where the actions at) will surely have a hard time reaching you. Thats first class Physics (I do hope I got the verb right:)); the cage of Faraday.
Who's read Stephen King's Dark Tower books? Anyone thinking Blaine the Mono?
Grab.
The German company was the 2nd choice
by
Glowing+Fish
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· Score: 3
A group of Slashdotters actually had the first bid for the job, and were going to build it for much cheaper out of legos and potatos, but the deal fell through when they ran out of 2*3 flatsies.
-- Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Re:The German company was the 2nd choice
by
Hard_Code
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· Score: 2
Yeah, too bad...it was going to be powered by the environmentally clean hot air from flamers and trolls...
Its a relief to finally see someone built such a thing. After more than twenty years of research and more than 20.000.000.000 DM of taxpayers money put into this, our new Government very nearly cancelled the whole thing.
Mind you not because the Construction of a Transrapid connection between Berlin and Hamburg would be too expensive (Actually it would cost not much more than an ICE connection (Germanies High speed train)) but because the Environmentalist Party in Germany (which governs our Land in Association with the Sozial-Democrates) blocked the Project due to environmental concerns.
But If you do not believe in such High tech yourself, How do you think someone else will buy it. (If we had a working Transrapid connection, we would have sold the Technology long ago to several other countries including the Netherlands, Japan and the U.S.)
But politicians only see the cost of a thing and whether or not it brings the voters favour to them, but not how much money they could make out of such an investment.
Regards
Jeff
The trains in japan use conventional engines to gain speed, then use magnetic fields for propulsion. The german transrapid is so far the only train that manages to do everything the maglev way.
Interesting tidbit: Germany wanted to build a Transrapid (their name for the maglev train) track between Hamburg and Berlin. They cancelled this, however, because of public resistance and the immense cost involved.
It's too bad, I'd really have liked to see it.
Re:Transrapid still WAY too expensive
by
RayChuang
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· Score: 2
Actually, Paris-Lyon is short-distance enough that a TGV does make sense, because I believe it takes about 2.5 hours nowadays to travel that distance by TGV.
It'll be interesting to see how much air traffic between Paris and Marseille is affected once the TGV line from Paris to Marseille allows for all high-speed running.
``The maglev train will act as a model to display the high-tech achievements of Shanghai"
I am rather confused. I agree that this would show the world that they are tech minded, but how does it show their high-tech achievements when the train is designed and the train cars built by a German company?
I don't think anybody has mentioned this so far, so I will.
There is a group at Lawrence Livermore National Lab that is working on a totally new MagLev system. It is called
Inductrak. What is unique about this system is that it uses totally passive technology.
It works by lining the center of the track with passive copper coils and lining the bottom of the train with Hallbach magnets. These Hallbach magnets have two interesing properties. One, they create a sinusoidally varying magnetic field, and two, the poles are aligned so that the magnetic field above the cabinet (i.e. where the passengers are) completely cancels out. What this means is that as the sinusoidally varying field passes over the passive coils, the coils create a repulsive field, but only so long as the train is moving. When the train slows down to below a few miles an hour, it will settle back down on the normal tracks.
The people who are developing this system are now working on a scale model with NASA for possible use in rocket launches.
But the real upshot to this sort of system, as opposed to the system mentioned in the article (Dynamic EM) or other such systems (Superconducting EM) is that the levitation system does not require precice computer control. With either of the other systems, a contol failure could cause a fatal accident. With Inductrack, the worst case scinario is a propulsion failure, in which case the train would simply continue floating until it slows down enough to land on the rails again.
The control issue is one of the major problems that have held back the deployment of large scale MagLev systems for decades. I think that this passive technology is probably going to prove to be the way to go. (IMHO, YMMV, etc.) --
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--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Mega-projects and national pride
by
LarsWestergren
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· Score: 3
The majority of the Chinese Communist Party stopped being communist almost 20 years ago if you look at the economic perspective (even though some hardline conservatives keep trying to turn back the clock). They have quietly drifted closer and closer to market economy, even though the official media keeps spouting tired old cliches like "The march towards true socialism continues!".
However, some things are harder to let go of. Criticism of the party is still stomped down on HARD, as are all suggestion of a multi-party democracy. Also remaining is a fondness for the old Stalinist type mega-projects. Big is beautiful. Damn the environmental consequences or the fact that smaller projects would make more economic sense. It seems China still suffers somewhat from an inferiority complex and therefore see a need to bolster their national pride with these absurd projects that are an enormous waste of money. The most obvious example is the Three Gorges Project, the world's largest dam.
Corruption, bureaucracy, environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale, *millions* of people homeless, expensive electricity and a dubious safety record. When (if) it is finished, I wouldn't want to live downriver from it for all the whisky in Ireland.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
These people are in a serious rush
by
luckykaa
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· Score: 2
It takes 8 minutes - Rather than the 12 or so that a conventional railway will take. What to do with all this saved time?
Trains, planes and automobiles
by
macpeep
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· Score: 2
Does anyone know of a study about how much fuel / passenger various types of transportation methods use? I mean, for a given distance, how much energy is used to get one passenger from A to B for planes vs. trains. vs. cars vs. ships? I know this varies by type of plane etc. but some kind of ballpark figures would be interesting. One would think a train at 350km/h is much more fuel-efficient than a plane at 900km/h but who knows.. For short trips when a proportionally large amount of time is spent on crowded airports and during takeoff and landings, the time difference should also not be so significant vs a train that gets you from A to B without delays and without holding patterns.
In slightly unrelated news, be sure to checkout Microsoft's upcoming train sim at http://www.microsoft.com/games/trainsim ! It looks like something every train fan out there would dream of!
Re:Trains, planes and automobiles
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stevelinton
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· Score: 2
Trains and planes both have very efficient engines, and expend almost all their thrust overcoming air resistance. Trains also lose a little in rolling resistance and some to turbulence because they are close to the ground. Planes move faster, and must waste some thrust on lift, but travel through less dense air. Trains have denser air at slower speeds, and can pull more people behind one front cross-section (in other words they are longer). Cars are way less efficient in all respects, but move much more slowly.
Technical Data (Re:The distances and the capacity)
by
yabHuj
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· Score: 2
*bzzzt*
The Transrapid is not using superconducting coils - but conventional e-magnets instead (combined lift and propulsion system). If there is a power outage it will drop onto its carbon-fibre braking sleds after the internal, constantly re-charged batteries have run dry.
More info on the (German language, sorry) Transrapid project page:
http://www.mvp.de/
A few facts: 128m length for 562 passengers, it only takes 165 seconds (or 16km) to reach 430km/h due to its ~25MW power linear motor. The energy consumption and noise is measurably lower than a comparable train (German ICE, French TGV, Japanese Shinkansen).
Japan is already too advanced in their own maglev project. They already have a good section of it, on which they have been conducting experiments, and I find it difficult anything China starts doing _now_ will get finished before the Tokyo-Osaka line.
China also announced today that not only are they going to build the worlds first Maglev train, which promises to reduce pollution via mass transit;
They have also announced that they are beginning the development of the automobile, which they say promises to produce much more pollution (with which, of course, future maglev trains will spawn) than their current ECO-threatening device, the bicycle.
krystal_blade
-- It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
seems to be kind of neurotic about their status as an international industrial power.
Completely unlike USofAmerica's obsessive neurosis with convincing themselves they are the most mighty, free and wealthy nation... of which only one is debatably true: mighty*. 'Freedom' in America is a popular myth and we all know that Canada has the highest standard of living in the world - I think the USofA falls about 5th (maybe 3 or 4th..). *There would probably be other 'mighty' nations if they spent the kind of money that your Industrial Military industry demands, and if they had the kind of Imperialist goals of the USofA.
No, the japanese bullet trains do not run on maglev at all.
The japanese *do* have a maglev project, though, and they have a few miles of it they use for various tests.
-- (8-DCS)
Re:Excluding the one in Germany?
by
yabHuj
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· Score: 2
According to the Transrapid info web page (German language) http://www.mvp.de/tr/eigen.html the system is ~6dB less noisy (1/4 perceived loudness) than a TGV or an ICE at same speed. At the same noise level the Transrapid can go ~100km/h faster than TGV or ICE.
The electric/magnetic field is comparable with a TV set in 3m distance - so not much. Depending on the Transrapid generation you either have high voltage lines within the rail (old) or static magnets for inductive energy transfer (new).
The trick with the latter: you only have a static local magnet field. The (fast) moving Transrapid percieves this local field as alternating magnetic field which is converted to electricity to power the carried batteries. No (dangerous) high voltage lines, no alternating magnetic fields.
Re:electromagnetic radiation
by
krlynch
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· Score: 2
More correctly, the presence of a changing magnetic field requires the presence of an electric field, and vice-versa.
Aside for people who've taken calculus based physics: If you remember the Maxwell equations, you should remember that there are four of them: two of them tell you how static charges give rise to E and B fields, and two that tell you how moving charges give rise to E and B fields, and additionally, how a time-varying E field gives rise to a B field and vice-versa. See, for example, Eric's Treasure Trove
Furthermore, there are some points about Faraday cages that you are missing: firstly, as another poster mentioned, any holes will reduce the effectiveness of the cage. Secondly, even a very good cage only keeps out static fields; time-varying fields penetrate into cages to a degree that depends on their frequency. For this, you'll need to check out an advanced undergraduate or graduate E&M text (such as Jackson). This is why, for instance, you can listen to the AM radio while riding in your car, and why you can talk on your cellphone inside an elevator (which are generally excellently well closed Faraday cages).
Transrapid still WAY too expensive
by
RayChuang
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· Score: 4
I think while it's nice that finally we'll see a major commercial application of maglev technology, the problem is that the cost of a Transrapid maglev on a per kilometer basis is WAY too expensive for what it does.
Already, a breakthrough announced in late 1999 promises to make Transrapid obselete; a bunch of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers trying to develop a better way to launch rockets into space cheaply came up with maglev system that uses mostly cheap permanent magnets to move the train along without the very precise engineering that the Transrapid needs.
They're now in the process of scaling up the technology to see if it will work on a larger scale; if it does, the US could actually take the lead on maglev research since the US will have by far the least expensive technology necessary to build a maglev train that goes between 400 and 500 km/h (248 to 310 mph).
Maglev's could drastically change transportation as we know it. Imagine going from downtown Chicago to downtown Minneapolis in under two hours, or Atlanta to Miami via Orlando, FL in just under three hours. It could make short-distance air travel obselete on any corridor where the maglev train is running.
Actually, I think you can. They have visiting days or something like that, and I think there are periods where one can actually catch a demonstration ride.
Of course, there isn't much of a point in catching a train that only stop at one station.:-)
For that matter, we only have a half-dozen to dozen cities where local
mass transict *can* be practical.
For conventional public transit, I think that is probably correct. I mean, I live in Chicago, which would probably be one of those cities, and it's still rather crappy. They are going to spend $380 million dollars renovating 6 miles of the El. That's insane. That's a tremendous waste of money.
However, I don't think things are entirely lost. I really think Personal Rapid Transit could work in most US cities. The quick summary, is small cars (one to three people) running on elevated tracks (but very small tracks, since the vehicles are light), with automated navigation (which is really easy, unlike cars, because they are on tracks).
The great part is that it doesn't require any special technology. It uses wheels, electric motors, and tracks on stilts. Nothing very expensive. Only the automated navigation is slightly technologically difficult, but I think that is quite doable. Even running at 30 or 35mph, it's still far faster than other forms of public transportation when considering the total travel time (including waiting, transfering, and walking to your final destination). In Chicago, it would be faster than driving most of the time.
People are of the perception that public transit has to be high-volume to be efficient, but that's not really the case -- if you can move people in a more parallel fashion, it can be efficient on a smaller scale. In this case, you don't stop until you get to your destination, and the cars can run fairly close together.
Sadly, governments just keep putting money into light rail, which is a complete waste. I wish it wasn't so -- but it just doesn't work, it's too slow, too irregular, and doesn't get people where they want to go.
Anyway, for someone who is interested in PRT, there's information to be found at Taxi 2000 (well, that name doesn't make sense anymore, does it?) and Citizens for PRT.
Re:Excluding the one in Germany?
by
pmc
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· Score: 3
And also excluding the actual first one, which was in the UK connecting Birmingham airport to the city centre. This was in 1984 (and it is now closed).
know it's a little naive, but is anyone else suprised that this is happening in China? I know they've got a space program etc etc but I have a real problem thinging of it as a high tech nation.
That's probably why they're doing it. China seems to be kind of neurotic about their status as an international industrial power. Witness the Great Leap Forward, where they tried to form an industrial base overnight (making farmers give up their fields to build "backyard furnaces" for steel production) or the Three Gorges Dam.
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It means the line has 50% more capacity. It may also create considerably less noise at high speeds, which both passengers and nearby residents probably appreciate.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what it did in France : air traffic between Paris and Lyon has been almost killed by the TGV, and companies flying Paris-Marseille are expecting a major loss starting next summer, when the high-speed line extension is completed.
-- Colin
Soft boil an egg.
Not to knock the work being done in China, but they are not the first Maglev.
Birmingham (UK, not AL) between the NEC exhibition centre and the train station. I'd guess it has been there for over 10 years. They announced plans in the middle of last year for a version 2.
--
DWR is Ajax for Java
Birmingham Aiport (BHX) in the UK West Midlands sported a commercial operating Maglev between the terminal and the main-line railway station for eleven years. It has recently been replaced. There's a relevant Scientific American article here.
I just feel sorry for the poor bastards who dress gothic style and wear lots of metal. They're fine until the train starts up... then all of a sudden they're pinned to the floor the train wishing they'd never had those 15 nose-rings put in.
here is a link to the transrapid web site.
- Safe. Yeah, right. Until the power goes off
- Energy efficient. Not unless you think squandering MW on keeping the levitation coils going is a good use of energy
- Slow (or slower than the alternative) because for every small increase in speed you need a disproportionate increase in magnet current to keep the thing stable
Of course they have to say that because they have such a huge investment in old and essentially useless tech.In fact, there is a magnetic levitation tech which is safe and energy efficient.
- It relies on coils in the track (closed loops, unpowered) and magnets on the train.
- The train has small wheels which it rides on until it reaches a critical velocity (around 30 km/h) above which the eddy-currents induced in the track coils generate enough of a repulsive force to lift the train.
- Mount coils and magnets horizontally and vertically in sidewalls and you get to go around corners safely too.
- The faster it goes, the more induced magnetism it generates, the more it holds itself stable
- Propulsion is by some kind of small jet/fan.
Safety is assured because there is no electric current to get interrupted.Check out Scientific American late last year for an article on this.
The hypocrisy comes from the Chinese (surprise!). How could this possible be a demonstration of China's technical prowess? A demonstration of Germany's perhaps, but not China's.
Disney wanted to build a maglev from the Orlando airport to Disney World, bypassing all competing attractions in the area, but even Team Rodent couldn't get that through the Florida legislature.
Actually, I do know that Eurostar has now nearly twice the people going between London and Paris as flying between London Heathrow/Gatwick and Paris/Charles de Gaulle airports. Eurostar is one reason why the hovercraft that used to ply the English Channel no longer do so. :(
The trip between London and Paris by Eurostar will be reduced by nearly 38 minutes when the new high-speed line from London's Waterloo International Station to Folkestone (the English side entrance to the tunnel) is completed in 2002.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Like the article said, there are serious concerns about the efects on local flora and fauna . . . and these will lead to human injuries
It can be expected to attract iron-rich plants, such as spinach. This in turn will attract cute little bunny rabbits. When the bunnies eat too much of the spinach, they will become stuck to the tracks.
With such easy targets, larger carnivores such as wolves and lions will be drawn to the area. After too many of these meals, they to will stick to the tracks, causing the train to derail.
Stop maglev now!
Oh, and think of the poor survivors, waiting for rescue, with no food but the spinach and bunnies. They'll have to shut off the electrical grid for half of Europe to unstick them from the tracks . . .
:)
Woah there, don't forget that most electric power is generated via a heat to work conversion innitially. Add that factor in and things don't look quite as good.
Mind you large central generators are more efficcant then most engines, but there is also power line loss.
14 May 2015 Press Scare Stories about possible health effects of high intensity magnetic fields.
17 May 2015 First lawsuit against the maglev operating company by a person who claims it gave him brain cancer.
Yeah! Next thing you know, they'll be indistinguishable from the US! (Well, ok, we don't have a Maoist gerontocracy ...)
>If you decide how technologically advanced a society is by the kind of
.75 . . . :)
>trains it uses, how do you think the US would do ?.
Quite well. Most of ours fly at about mach
More seriously, though, for the most part the U.S. isn't dense enough
for trains to be practical, though there are notable exceptions.
For that matter, we only have a half-dozen to dozen cities where local
mass transict *can* be practical.
hawk
Boone, Iowa used to be a major rail center--three lines crossed there, or some such. Today, their rail preservation society (or whatever) operates what they claim is the last production built coal-fired steam engine--it was built in China.
So on weekends in spring and summer, you can go to the only stop, catch a ride on an honest-to-God steam engine, and leave smiling, but with flecks of coal all over your clothing . . .
That doesn't have to be the case, it all depends on how you create the magnetic field. A magnetic field on its own doesn't have anything electrical about it unless you move a coil through the field. Then you are creating electricity, the principle of the dynamo. But thats pretty hard to compare with a mobile phone; thats a totally different story.
The next thing you are totally forgetting is Faraday. If you're inside a metal train then the electro magnetic fields generated by this train (remember; the tracks aka bottom of the train is where the actions at) will surely have a hard time reaching you. Thats first class Physics (I do hope I got the verb right :)); the cage of Faraday.
Who's read Stephen King's Dark Tower books? Anyone thinking Blaine the Mono?
Grab.
A group of Slashdotters actually had the first bid for the job, and were going to build it for much cheaper out of legos and potatos, but the deal fell through when they ran out of 2*3 flatsies.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Its a relief to finally see someone built such a thing. After more than twenty years of research and more than 20.000.000.000 DM of taxpayers money put into this, our new Government very nearly cancelled the whole thing. Mind you not because the Construction of a Transrapid connection between Berlin and Hamburg would be too expensive (Actually it would cost not much more than an ICE connection (Germanies High speed train)) but because the Environmentalist Party in Germany (which governs our Land in Association with the Sozial-Democrates) blocked the Project due to environmental concerns. But If you do not believe in such High tech yourself, How do you think someone else will buy it. (If we had a working Transrapid connection, we would have sold the Technology long ago to several other countries including the Netherlands, Japan and the U.S.) But politicians only see the cost of a thing and whether or not it brings the voters favour to them, but not how much money they could make out of such an investment. Regards Jeff
The trains in japan use conventional engines to gain speed, then use magnetic fields for propulsion. The german transrapid is so far the only train that manages to do everything the maglev way.
Interesting tidbit: Germany wanted to build a Transrapid (their name for the maglev train) track between Hamburg and Berlin. They cancelled this, however, because of public resistance and the immense cost involved.
It's too bad, I'd really have liked to see it.
Actually, Paris-Lyon is short-distance enough that a TGV does make sense, because I believe it takes about 2.5 hours nowadays to travel that distance by TGV.
It'll be interesting to see how much air traffic between Paris and Marseille is affected once the TGV line from Paris to Marseille allows for all high-speed running.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
``The maglev train will act as a model to display the high-tech achievements of Shanghai"
I am rather confused. I agree that this would show the world that they are tech minded, but how does it show their high-tech achievements when the train is designed and the train cars built by a German company?
"You like Chinese food." -Fortune Cookie
Mopeds.
-Ben
There is a group at Lawrence Livermore National Lab that is working on a totally new MagLev system. It is called Inductrak. What is unique about this system is that it uses totally passive technology.
It works by lining the center of the track with passive copper coils and lining the bottom of the train with Hallbach magnets. These Hallbach magnets have two interesing properties. One, they create a sinusoidally varying magnetic field, and two, the poles are aligned so that the magnetic field above the cabinet (i.e. where the passengers are) completely cancels out. What this means is that as the sinusoidally varying field passes over the passive coils, the coils create a repulsive field, but only so long as the train is moving. When the train slows down to below a few miles an hour, it will settle back down on the normal tracks.
The people who are developing this system are now working on a scale model with NASA for possible use in rocket launches.
But the real upshot to this sort of system, as opposed to the system mentioned in the article (Dynamic EM) or other such systems (Superconducting EM) is that the levitation system does not require precice computer control. With either of the other systems, a contol failure could cause a fatal accident. With Inductrack, the worst case scinario is a propulsion failure, in which case the train would simply continue floating until it slows down enough to land on the rails again.
The control issue is one of the major problems that have held back the deployment of large scale MagLev systems for decades. I think that this passive technology is probably going to prove to be the way to go. (IMHO, YMMV, etc.)
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
However, some things are harder to let go of. Criticism of the party is still stomped down on HARD, as are all suggestion of a multi-party democracy. Also remaining is a fondness for the old Stalinist type mega-projects. Big is beautiful. Damn the environmental consequences or the fact that smaller projects would make more economic sense. It seems China still suffers somewhat from an inferiority complex and therefore see a need to bolster their national pride with these absurd projects that are an enormous waste of money. The most obvious example is the Three Gorges Project, the world's largest dam.
Corruption, bureaucracy, environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale, *millions* of people homeless, expensive electricity and a dubious safety record. When (if) it is finished, I wouldn't want to live downriver from it for all the whisky in Ireland.
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Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
It takes 8 minutes - Rather than the 12 or so that a conventional railway will take. What to do with all this saved time?
Does anyone know of a study about how much fuel / passenger various types of transportation methods use? I mean, for a given distance, how much energy is used to get one passenger from A to B for planes vs. trains. vs. cars vs. ships? I know this varies by type of plane etc. but some kind of ballpark figures would be interesting. One would think a train at 350km/h is much more fuel-efficient than a plane at 900km/h but who knows.. For short trips when a proportionally large amount of time is spent on crowded airports and during takeoff and landings, the time difference should also not be so significant vs a train that gets you from A to B without delays and without holding patterns.
In slightly unrelated news, be sure to checkout Microsoft's upcoming train sim at http://www.microsoft.com/games/trainsim ! It looks like something every train fan out there would dream of!
*bzzzt*
The Transrapid is not using superconducting coils - but conventional e-magnets instead (combined lift and propulsion system). If there is a power outage it will drop onto its carbon-fibre braking sleds after the internal, constantly re-charged batteries have run dry.
More info on the (German language, sorry) Transrapid project page:
http://www.mvp.de/
A few facts: 128m length for 562 passengers, it only takes 165 seconds (or 16km) to reach 430km/h due to its ~25MW power linear motor. The energy consumption and noise is measurably lower than a comparable train (German ICE, French TGV, Japanese Shinkansen).
Japan is already too advanced in their own maglev project. They already have a good section of it, on which they have been conducting experiments, and I find it difficult anything China starts doing _now_ will get finished before the Tokyo-Osaka line.
(8-DCS)
They have also announced that they are beginning the development of the automobile, which they say promises to produce much more pollution (with which, of course, future maglev trains will spawn) than their current ECO-threatening device, the bicycle.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
seems to be kind of neurotic about their status as an international industrial power.
Completely unlike USofAmerica's obsessive neurosis with convincing themselves they are the most mighty, free and wealthy nation... of which only one is debatably true: mighty*. 'Freedom' in America is a popular myth and we all know that Canada has the highest standard of living in the world - I think the USofA falls about 5th (maybe 3 or 4th..). *There would probably be other 'mighty' nations if they spent the kind of money that your Industrial Military industry demands, and if they had the kind of Imperialist goals of the USofA.
No, the japanese bullet trains do not run on maglev at all.
The japanese *do* have a maglev project, though, and they have a few miles of it they use for various tests.
(8-DCS)
The electric/magnetic field is comparable with a TV set in 3m distance - so not much. Depending on the Transrapid generation you either have high voltage lines within the rail (old) or static magnets for inductive energy transfer (new).
The trick with the latter: you only have a static local magnet field. The (fast) moving Transrapid percieves this local field as alternating magnetic field which is converted to electricity to power the carried batteries. No (dangerous) high voltage lines, no alternating magnetic fields.
More correctly, the presence of a changing magnetic field requires the presence of an electric field, and vice-versa.
Aside for people who've taken calculus based physics: If you remember the Maxwell equations, you should remember that there are four of them: two of them tell you how static charges give rise to E and B fields, and two that tell you how moving charges give rise to E and B fields, and additionally, how a time-varying E field gives rise to a B field and vice-versa. See, for example, Eric's Treasure Trove
Furthermore, there are some points about Faraday cages that you are missing: firstly, as another poster mentioned, any holes will reduce the effectiveness of the cage. Secondly, even a very good cage only keeps out static fields; time-varying fields penetrate into cages to a degree that depends on their frequency. For this, you'll need to check out an advanced undergraduate or graduate E&M text (such as Jackson). This is why, for instance, you can listen to the AM radio while riding in your car, and why you can talk on your cellphone inside an elevator (which are generally excellently well closed Faraday cages).
I think while it's nice that finally we'll see a major commercial application of maglev technology, the problem is that the cost of a Transrapid maglev on a per kilometer basis is WAY too expensive for what it does.
Already, a breakthrough announced in late 1999 promises to make Transrapid obselete; a bunch of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers trying to develop a better way to launch rockets into space cheaply came up with maglev system that uses mostly cheap permanent magnets to move the train along without the very precise engineering that the Transrapid needs.
They're now in the process of scaling up the technology to see if it will work on a larger scale; if it does, the US could actually take the lead on maglev research since the US will have by far the least expensive technology necessary to build a maglev train that goes between 400 and 500 km/h (248 to 310 mph).
Maglev's could drastically change transportation as we know it. Imagine going from downtown Chicago to downtown Minneapolis in under two hours, or Atlanta to Miami via Orlando, FL in just under three hours. It could make short-distance air travel obselete on any corridor where the maglev train is running.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Actually, I think you can. They have visiting days or something like that, and I think there are periods where one can actually catch a demonstration ride.
:-)
Of course, there isn't much of a point in catching a train that only stop at one station.
(8-DCS)
However, I don't think things are entirely lost. I really think Personal Rapid Transit could work in most US cities. The quick summary, is small cars (one to three people) running on elevated tracks (but very small tracks, since the vehicles are light), with automated navigation (which is really easy, unlike cars, because they are on tracks).
The great part is that it doesn't require any special technology. It uses wheels, electric motors, and tracks on stilts. Nothing very expensive. Only the automated navigation is slightly technologically difficult, but I think that is quite doable. Even running at 30 or 35mph, it's still far faster than other forms of public transportation when considering the total travel time (including waiting, transfering, and walking to your final destination). In Chicago, it would be faster than driving most of the time.
People are of the perception that public transit has to be high-volume to be efficient, but that's not really the case -- if you can move people in a more parallel fashion, it can be efficient on a smaller scale. In this case, you don't stop until you get to your destination, and the cars can run fairly close together.
Sadly, governments just keep putting money into light rail, which is a complete waste. I wish it wasn't so -- but it just doesn't work, it's too slow, too irregular, and doesn't get people where they want to go.
Anyway, for someone who is interested in PRT, there's information to be found at Taxi 2000 (well, that name doesn't make sense anymore, does it?) and Citizens for PRT.
Ho hum, another non-story.
know it's a little naive, but is anyone else suprised that this is happening in China? I know they've got a space program etc etc but I have a real problem thinging of it as a high tech nation.
That's probably why they're doing it. China seems to be kind of neurotic about their status as an international industrial power. Witness the Great Leap Forward, where they tried to form an industrial base overnight (making farmers give up their fields to build "backyard furnaces" for steel production) or the Three Gorges Dam.
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It means the line has 50% more capacity. It may also create considerably less noise at high speeds, which both passengers and nearby residents probably appreciate.