Slashdot Mirror
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.
...is through the planet core
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think this hyperloop is going to crash into the harsh realities of dealing with a vacuum.
a) It takes a huge amount of energy to pull a good vacuum. This thing needs to be at 0.02 psi. Vacuum pumps are really inefficient. They mostly take electricity and generate lots of heat.
b) Running the pumps is going to cost. Vacuum pumps burn out/need maintenance.
c) 0.02 psi? That translates into a HUGE amount of force trying to crush the tube. 14 lbs/ square inch. It adds up QUICK. Better hope some 13 year old doesn't think it would be funny to put an M-80 on this thing. It might implode and kill anyone in the pod.
d) Ever to try keep a vacuum? Good luck finding all the little leaks in the seals over X miles of this tube. Getting it evacuated once will be difficult. Now try to keep it sealed for a year. You have the stress of the pods flying through this thing. You have heating and cooling cycles every 24 hours.
It will make a awesome science project for some students spending lots of other people's money.
Isn't the US using metric like the rest of the world?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We don't need no stinking carriages!
TFA is somewhat lacking in actual information.
I'd like to know what makes one design of a hyperloop capsule better than another.
Anybody have any links?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Depends... if you can't hold it for a half hour
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
what is relationship of these to pneumatic tubes ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
is this a second coming? if so, have they overcome whatever problems they had, that made them go out of fashion after fairly wide use at one time.
From http://www.gizmag.com/mit-hype...
The MIT team's winning design details a 250 kg (551 lb) passenger pod with an exterior crafted from carbon fiber and polycarbonate sheets. With a passive magnetic levitation system comprising 20 neodymium magnets, the pod is designed to maintain a 15 mm (0.6 in) levitation gap above the track.
The team says with the lowest available tube pressure available of 140 Pa, the pod should be accelerated at 2.4 G and have 2 N aerodynamic drag when traveling at 110 m/s. The design also features a fail-safe braking system that automatically brings the pod to a halt should the actuators or computers fail, and low speed drive wheels that can move the pod forwards or backwards at 1 m/s in an emergency situation.
The same way as in normal trains. They have a vacuum toilet which transports the waste into a bucket. The bucket is then cleaned at the destination.
The division in society cannot be solved with faster transportation. It only allows you to run away from each other. Local transport is much more an issue.
"These subsections can be quite small, say 5-10 metres wide where they might pull the air out just as the pod reaches that area."
So you're going to have vacuum containment doors all along this tube that have to open just as a 700 mph pod comes barrelling through and suck the air out in that moment too? Oh yeah, thats sounds workable. What other projects is the Mad Hatter working on in Wonderland at the moment just out of interest?
"this was just 5 minutes guess work."
No shit.
The cost for pipeline construction is... well, the cost of pipeline construction. We already make giant elevated pipelines thousands of kilometers long. The costs aren't prohibitive, and are far less than rail. Compared to a big oil pipeline project, Hyperloop has some advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages:
* Significantly less column loading
* No fire risk
* No spill risk
* Easier thermal management
* Easier permitting (one of the biggest costs)
* Less NIMBY opposition
* Lower pumping loads/power consumption
Disadvantages:
* Much greater need for internal precision (requires an internal polisher)
* Must be maintained highly straight, even during thermal expansion
* Human lives directly involved, not just indirectly.
* Larger diameter than most pipelines; comparable to the size of the worlds' largest pipelines
* New technology
Neutral/shared:
* Both require regular monitoring equipment, although different types
* Both need to meet stringent standards again natural or manmade disasters, such as earthquakes or car accidents
* Oil requires valves/tees/access points; Hyperloop requires periodic emergency exits
* Fairly similar wall thicknesses, though an oil pipeline of this diameter would have slightly higher walls due to the higher loading
I see no reason to expect the costs (for a given diameter) to be off from each other by orders of magnitude. And the cost of the steel itself is almost irrelevant compared to the total costs (see the calculations above).
And no, you could not "build a lot of new track for passenger and freight service" for $6B. California's HSR project for example is $70B. Part of the main impetus of Hyperloop was to be significantly cheaper than HSR while providing higher transit speeds (although to be fair to HSR, Hyperloop is not designed as a direct replacement; it's only point-to-point, no intermediary stops, and lower net throughput - more of an cross between rail and air travel). The main way in which it's cheaper (in addition to not having all of the stops, aka having to go through towns, and instead largely sticking to rural highways where right-of-way and permitting is much cheaper and easier) is that by dividing the load out into numerous smaller vehicles, the peak "track" loadings are far less with Hyperloop. Loadings are strongly correlated with cost.
That's a bizarre claim, given that its energy per passenger mile is far less than any other current form of transportation and it's designed to generate its own power via solar.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
What do you mean since Dice sold it? Slashdot has never had actual editors. I'm honestly not quite sure what Timothy does all day.
For your advantages, I disagree with quite a few.
"No spill risk" - There's a huge spill risk, it's just in the opposite direction. Trying to manage leaks in oil pipelines is a bloody fricken nightmare and was considered one of the biggest problems with the pipeline from the oil sands. Now you're needing to maintain vacuums while dealing with the same leaks. Yes, the leak is no longer leaving oil around, but it's still just as big of a problem. Not only that, but the leaks are going to be far more common since oil pipelines are between 12-24 inches, no meters across.
"Easier thermal management" - What are you talking about? True you don't have to worry about keeping it warm enough, but if it starts to get hot, you don't have a liquid shooting through it to actively cool it. Now, I realize in an ideal world there would be no heat since the it wouldn't touch the walls of the thing and there would be no air to compress, but from what I've heard, the vacuum may not be as much of a complete vacuum as some would like us to believe, and if that's the case, dissipating heat could become a problem. Time will tell on this as the project continues.
"Easier permitting" - Said from a guy who clearly has never been involved with the permits to get a road built. This will be an absolute nightmare. I've seen before where you said they'd just build above roads, but the roads weren't permitted to be built that high in the first place. And the NIMBYs will come out in force. In area, there's a multi-million dollar lawsuit going on because somebody built a fence and it "spoiled the view" of some of the other residents. If you don't think this is going to be a major problem, you are delusional.
"Less NIMBY opposition" - See my previous portion on permitting.
"Lower pumping loads/power requirements" - I'm going to need to see justification for this. You are trying to maintain a near vacuum through a massive pipe. Maintaining vacuums on small scale isn't efficient, why will it be at large scale? The pipe is going to leak, even with the best welds. We see this in ships and submarines today which is why they need water pumps to remove the water, why would this tube be any different? I saw people mentioning that they would only evacuate the portions of the pipe currently in use. How? I've never seen a near vacuum made quickly. And even if they can, how are they going to do it efficiently? We see it in our world, it's relatively easy to add something quickly, but tends to be hard to remove things quickly. Flash boiling water by adding a lot of energy, easy. Flash freezing water by removing a lot of energy, not so easy. Adding pressure, easy. Removing pressure, I'm going to need to see some justification that this is easy.
Greens are protesting this proposed line because of the possibility that a leak will release Canadians into the environment, endangering the Nebraska sandhill crane.
Hmm. The only pipelines that have the 2m + ID required for a hyperloop are water pipelines, and those ginormous mains are typically not elevated, but rather buried. Sometimes they're bored through rock and the walls cast in place like NYC's Tunnel #3, a project which when it completes in 2020 will have taken fifty years to bridge 100 km.
Of course the biggest advantage as you point out is that the weight of a hyperloop is going to weigh much less than a pipeline that carries liquid, so you wouldn't have to bury it. But I think it's likely that the project will be unique, and I doubt you can estimate it precisely just by extrapolating from experience with water or oil pipelines. I think they'll have to build a non-trivially sized working model first.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Single passenger row. So if you are going with someone you can't talk to them during the trip. Or a parent can't sit with their child. Image a young brat misbehaving for the trip and the parent isn't beside them to get them to stop. And what are you supposed to do with someone who is afraid to travel that way? Strap them in and leave them alone?
I know the selling point is the speed of the trip but, for example, if business people can't make use of the time while on there then it becomes less useful for them.
Question: How do you go to the toilet in these pods?
You give all the passengers hyper-incontinence pads.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There was an episode of Sea Quest DSV that had a concept similar to this.