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Hyperloop One Technology Tested Successfully In Nevada Desert
Dave Knott quotes a report from CBC.ca: Hyperloop One (formerly known as Hyperloop Technologies) conducted a successful test of its high speed transportation technology Wednesday in the desert outside Las Vegas. The seconds-long, outdoor demonstration featured what appeared to be a blip of metal gliding across a small track before disappearing into a cloud against the desert landscape. A fully operational hyperloop would whisk passengers and cargo in pods through a low pressure tube at speeds of up to 1,207 kph (750 mph). Maglev technology would levitate the pods to reduce friction in the city-to-city system, which would be fully autonomous and electric powered. A day earlier, the company had announced the closing of $80 million in financing and said it plans to conduct a full system test before the end of the year.
that is all
but it troubles me that the name of the company and the technology both start with "hype".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
LInk to the classic Simpsons musical, Monorail
Monorail, Monorail, MONORAIL!
I mean, HYPERLOOP!
Seriously though, train systems of all sorts are an important part of an overall transportation network - it's just too appropriate not to post.
Ryan Fenton
I thought tve whole point of hyperloop systems were that they did not use maglev, but floating on a cusion of air insude a tunnel instead. To radically reduce cost.
So ideally for a freight rail system we want high throughput, short delivery times, cheap, and running to/from convenient nearby locations.
Breaking this down further, it suggests we want
* Small trains (lowers latency - less time to wait for a train going to your destination. Removes/reduces need for transferring cargo between trains by allowing point-to-point service, so long as the 'point's are train stations.)
* Autonomous (required by 'small trains' and 'cheap')
* Handles congestion well (for high throughput with lots of small trains)
* Fast
* Moderately priced infrastructure.
* High density of train stations around the country
I.e. something like an internet for shipping containers.
Hyperloop gives us 'fast', but fails on infrastructure price, fails at least initially on density of stations, and congestion may be problematic. Starting with the existing rail network and moving to more automation and smaller trains and solving some congestion problems (perhaps the hardest bit) gives everything but 'fast', but for many purposes is 'fast enough'.
It still needs to be competitive compared to autonomous trucks.
TL;DR: I agree.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
This is already partially solved in a way similar to passenger jets, which have to deal with a similar problem. You need enough oxygen for each passenger to last long enough until the problem can be addressed. For a passenger jet, that means 12-15 minutes while the pilot dives to low altitude. For a low pressure tunnel emergency that means slowing the train down and then letting normal air pressure into the tunnel in a controlled fashion. As far as air resistance is concerned, I think you are thinking about lower speeds than are planned for a hyperloop solution. Hyperloop designs are considering speeds that approach or possibly exceed mach 1. Drag goes up exponentially (velocity squared), so the air density becomes a much greater issue at those speeds. Besides drag, you also have to take into account the heating of the train due to drag.
That sounds like a solution looking for a problem. My uncle and grandfather work(ed) for the railroad. For freight, you're never going to make a dent with this plan. Freight is all about momentum, not speed. Starting and stopping cargo are the hardest parts. You need a powerful engine just to move 1 fully loaded car, but that same engine can pull lots of cars -- it just hast to pick up speed over time. You're never going to pick up serious speed before you get to a populated area where you have to slow down -- because railways cross roadways. Stopping even a single car quickly requires a bag of sand to be dropped on the steel railing and makes enough friction to ruin the wheels. You're not going to get cars carrying tons of cargo to go faster than the current system. Worse -- breaking up a single locomotive train w/ tens of cars into lots of smaller cars means lots and lots of wasteful engines that have to pull those smaller cars. They'd also have to have a much larger space between each car to be able to reasonably slow down in time should one have a problem. You'd need to increase the number of tracks to make up for the wasted space to push the same amount of cargo over time. In short, there's reasons why they do things the way they do them now... mostly physics and logistics reasons.
Assuming you could update the patchwork of decades old systems properly, it wouldn't give you much savings as humans will likely be required for safety reasons well into the future - just like pilots still fly passenger planes even though autopilot does most of the work between take-offs and landings... even subway trains have conductors. We're talking about miles of track that cross public roadways with children on bikes -- not going to go fully automatic anytime soon.
Even if you re-designed the entire system to be above-ground mag-lev freight with novel breaking systems to achieve this insane acceleration/deceleration, you'd have such massive construction and power issues, it would be super-expensive. The average weight for a freight rail car is around 130 tons fully loaded. A fully loaded passenger maglev car is between 50 and 70 tons. It's not impossible... and one could often just split the cargo between multiple cars if needed. It'd be expensive, though. You'd still need to use trucks to get from the train station to the final destination.
The hyperloop is for extremely fast passenger travel to replace airlines. It has lightweight cargo (people and maybe luggage), and can be built on railways above ground with cheaper construction than the support needed for heavy freight. Above-ground tubing can be safe enough to be an automated system. It's horribly expensive because of the land purchase, construction, maintenance, safety, etc... but, once it's built, it could offer transportation faster and safer than air travel. Should eventually be cheaper, too -- and no need to worry about hijackers as it's on a track... and there's no explosive fuel to blow up a building with even if it went off-track.
Basically, the hyperloop is the replacement for air travel over land. It could also carry cargo/freight in addition to passengers if the weight and space constraints allow. A hyperloop or maglev train system might solve other problems with the freight industry as well.
Yeah, I'm sure they're all idiots and you have the complete engineering context for this test.
I'd be curious to know(I'm not doing doubt-in-the-form-of-a-question, I honestly don't know) how much freight goes by truck rather than by rail because of deficiencies in the rail network;
I've been a supply chain and logistics guy for most of my career. The answer is not much but it depends on what you want to do.
First of all, you can never get rid of the truck. The problem with trains, ships and the Hyperloop is they're lines to single points, but the freight is only useful at the point where it needs to go IE a store or warehouse or factory. You will never have a Hyperloop station at every store or warehouse or factory, so you always need a truck to deliver from the station to the destination point; this is referred to as drayage.
AIr freight is not an option. It's 100 times more expensive per lb than any other method and it's used only for specialty stuff. 98% of the worlds' goods move via containers and no plane can handle a container at all. So we'll just take the plane out.
Truck across country is beneficial because you can move a whole container fast; a truck driving from the East Coast to the west coast with a 2 man team (where one sleeps while the other drives) can move across the country in 24 to 36 hours. This is expensive, it costs around $6,000 to $10,000 per container and only used in "rush" jobs.
Rail has time constraints because you have to stick to the train schedules, adn the trains may make several stops. If time is not a factor this is ideal, as it costs around $1,500 to move a container via rail and can take about 1 to 2 weeks depending on when you can get rail booked.
Ship is best. If you're in the Midwest and shipping to the East coast, you're near the Mississippi River system and you can put a container on a barge and float it all the way to Maine if you want. It takes about 2 weeks but the cost is about $300. This is not really an option for West Coast to East Coast or back shipping because Central America is in the way, and the Panama Canal is expensive unless it's on a ship that can handle 2,000 to 5,000 containers.
The cheapest is by water, always. It's around 10% of the cost of any other form of freight, adn the bigger the ship, the lower the cost. The Panama Canal is mainly used for international freight, goods from Asia being sold in the US, but you can only get a 5,000 container ship through the Canal whereas the biggest ships are 18,000, so some freight is offloaded on the West coast and sent via rail East. All that is changing with the Canal expansion which can now take 12,000 container ships, so there is going to be a reduction in freight moving via land already.
But the truck will never go away. Rail, water, or Hyperloop, freight has to go to a station, and then it has to get from the station to it's destination. That requires a truck, period. Hyperloop will not deliver to every store or every warehouse in the world. This is called drayage and it's expensive, drayage runs around $300 to $500 per truck depending on size and what you're carrying. So Hyperloop for moving freight is actually competing iwth water transport via the canal and still has the trucks for the final point delivery, and quite frankly I don't see how they get there at all.
Constant in exponent is called polynomial (and does not grow exponentially). Both your examples have time in the exponent (not the base) and does grow exponentially. Almost everything you wrote is wrong.