MIT Team Tops Hyperloop Design Competition (google.com)

The Dallas Morning News reports that a team from MIT has topped competitors from around 100 universities around the world at a competition held on the campus of Texas A&M by presenting a workable design vision for Elon Musk's dream of a hyperloop. The hyperloop concept, mentioned several times before on Slashdot, involves rapidly shuffling passenger pods through 12-foot-wide tubes evacuated of air, and would mean terrestrial transport at speeds topping those of commercial air travel. From the Morning News article: Delft University of Technology from The Netherlands finished second, the University of Wisconsin third, Virginia Tech fourth and the University of California, Irvine, fifth. The top teams will build their pods and test them at the world's first Hyperloop Test Track, being built adjacent to SpaceX's Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters.

Comments

Yes, and the fastest way to China,

[fustakrakich]

...is through the planet core

What are miles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the US using metric like the rest of the world?

Re:Nature Abhors a Vacuum

[Anonymous Coward]

> HUGE amount of force trying to crush the tube. 14 lbs/ square inch.

It's not that much. The first loop is planned to be 354 miles long. That is 2.243e+7" in length. The tube is 452" in circumference. The total surface area of the tube is 2.243e+7 * 452 = 10,138,360,000 inch^2. Multiply that by 14.7 pounds / inch^2, and you have 149,033,892,000 total pounds of pressure which is only the weight of about 9,250 Eiffel Towers.