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South Korea Signs On To Build Full-Scale Hyperloop System (newatlas.com)
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) has partnered with the South Korean government and local universities to build the world's first full-scale Hyperloop system. "The agreement was actually signed back in January but only revealed this week, and sees HTT team up with the South Korean government's department of technological innovation and infrastructure, along with the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building (KICT) and Hanyang University," reports New Atlas. From the report: It involves the construction of a full-scale testbed, licensing of HTT's vacuum tube, levitation, propulsion and battery technologies along with the co-development of safety standards and regulations. The agreement is a multi-year partnership intended to build a new transportation system for South Korea, one which will be known as the HyperTube Express and carry passengers between Seoul and Busan in under 20 minutes, compared to the current three-hour drive. HTT may be setting out to build the world's first Hyperloop but it is no guarantee, with fellow startups Arrivo and Hyperloop One also moving full-steam ahead with their plans. The latter in particular seems to be making solid progress, recently showing off a full-scale test track in Nevada and forming agreements with Russia, Finland and Dubai to explore the feasibility of a Hyperloop in those countries. It's too early to tell who will be first out of the gate, but the competition is certainly heating up.
shit, it's not even transistorized.
Nullius in verba
Someone has not experienced South Korean traffic.
I once traveled Amtrak from Seattle to Atlanta. It took a little over 5.5 days. The ticket was $2,300 since I wanted a place to sleep since sitting in chair would have just been hell for most of a week. Even if Amtrak could do 300 MPH between stops, it still would have taken three entire days (yes, I did the math since I had nothing but time during my trip) including the long layovers to change trains so that is still pretty crappy.
You know a town with money is a little like the mule with a spinning wheel.
No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it.
- Introductory remarks before the Simpson's Monorail Song
Could you imagine trying to rig that up like they have in planes or busses?
you overbuild it. they said all the same stuff about trains. the rail is vulnerable. anyone could just go out and unbolt parts of it! etc etc
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, the whole thing is ridiculous. Check out Thunderf00t's analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
I've frequently used large hammers on vacuum vessels that were under vacuum, and they didn't collapse. When you work on plasma experiments, you can end up with mangled electrical components that take a lot of force to remove, but you don't want to break vacuum to do so (there is a big difference between an easy to reach low friction low vacuum, and ultrahigh vacuum that can be ruined by just a thin layer of water from exposing a surface to humidity). The vessels are often just tubes of stainless, and they can take a beating. The problems you refer to are from unpressurized or light pressure vessels that aren't stiff enough to handle buckling... which is easily solved by making the material a little bit thicker (it stiffens faster than linear with thickness). Making vacuum systems of various qualities is a long since solved problem with a lot of off the shelf parts, although there is some room for economy of scale developments.
That's not in the slightest "how they're selling it". Read the design document. To reiterate that which for some inexplicable reason has to be repeated in every thread about Hyperloop: the Hyperloop Alpha design:
* Is not a pneumatic tube
* Is not a vacuum train
* Would not even work in a hard vacuum
* Is not maglev
* Is a ground-effect aircraft / air-bearing suspended vehicle in a highly rarified atmosphere, utilizing a battery-powered compressor to shunt the air built up ahead of the vehicle to the suspension and behind the vehicle.
Your failure to read anything about how it works is nobody's fault but your own.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Right. Because when I want an engineering analysis, I always turn to an organic chemist.
Meanwhile, in the real world, mild or hard vacuum lines and chambers are widely used in industry (for example, see VDUs), and designing a structure to be stable against vacuum, including in catastrophic-rupture scenarios is basic engineering. Believe me, the VDU and its low pressure lines are not what people at refineries fear ruptures in - if you want to see some alarm, rupture a line for a hydrocracker.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
I checked it out. He thinks it's impossible because...expansion joints and because the atmosfear is too heavy. Right. Sorry but his analysis is bullshit and he nitpicks at lots of things that are irrelevant to the main idea. Like whether powering it with solar panels is viable or what the price of a ticket will be. Who gives a shit? A regular high speed train doesn't need to be solar powered and neither does a hyperloop and if the tickets are expensive so what? It will be a train system for the rich then. It will still be cool and maybe someone will eventually figure out how to build a cheaper vacuum tunnel transportation system that the common people can ride in. This is just the start. Guessing the future is always a bad idea but if I had to guess I would say vacuum tunnels are a good guess at what our ground transportation will look like in a few hundred years. It is also easier to power without fossil fuels than aircraft and we may run out of fossil fuels in less than a hundred years.
I get that people don't like new ideas or that maybe people just don't like Elon Musk, but at least be honest in an analysis of the engineering challenges. It is most certainly not an impossible or ridiculous dream. It's doable from an engineering POV. It's just very very expensive and there may be problems maintaining the vacuum in practice.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
So, so many things wrong with this. First, you rupture the vacuum, you don't kill people. The train coasts to a stop, just like any other object traveling at 500 mph in the air (like, say, a passenger jet, except you don't have to worry about crashing into the ground because you're on the ground). The system is really just a high-speed train that operates in a vacuum for increased efficiency. Secondly, vacuum chambers tend to not be all that delicate. In fact, they tend to be made of incredibly tough material, because that's how you make a vacuum chamber. If you can swing a hammer strong enough to visibly dent half an inch of solid steel I'd be shocked (and it wouldn't lose vacuum due to a dent). Even if you punctured it with a rifle round (good luck with that), life isn't a Hollywood movie: the thing's not going to explode in a giant fireball, it's just going to (rather slowly) lose vacuum. Hell, they might not even notice right away: you need continuously running vacuum pumps to deal with leakage anyways, which will already be handling inflow on the level of a few mm sized hole. Now, if you hit it with an RPG, you might make a decent hole. Probably not, mind you: solid steel is no weakling. Your best bet would be C4, or maybe a bunch of thermite to cut the entire tube in half. That might actually kill people.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
VDUs are also much higher diameter, which makes them harder to design, not easier. And the feed lines can have very high length to diameter ratios.
It's the same engineering principles. The amount of structural reinforcement - both wall thickness, and reinforcing rings - to resist implosion is very well understood engineering and there are standard guidelines for it. Thunderf00t's ignorant nonsense to the contrary headlined with comic sans text done in what looks like MS Paint notwithstanding.
The share of vacuum-related energy required equates to pennies worth of electricity per passenger-trip. And the energy density of the tube is orders of magnitude less than a tube full of typical hydrocarbon fuels (aka a pipeline). The maximum instantaneously deliverable power at a point of rupture is also orders of magnitude less than that of a collision of a loaded passenger train.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
It's funny how the people who insist that vacuum systems are horribly unsafe and unstable have never actually worked with vacuum systems ;)
Say we have one kilometer of tube with 7 ft diameter, so the volume is about 3500 m^3. The crappy vacuum roughing pump I used in a previous lab was 25 m^3/hr with a 1 hp motor, so it would take 23 days to pump to a solid medium vacuum using that one crappy pump that utilizes half a household outlet. That is about 430 kW-hr of electricity, so around $60 per kilometer to pump out. A larger pump would be more efficient, and with off-the-shelf metal seals, there would be no problems with a mechanical pump keeping up with typical leak rates (metal seal leak rate matter when you're trying to do UHV stuff with much lower pressures that won't matter as far as air resistances).
So a ballpark cost of $60k to pump out a 1000 km route? Plus some maintenance on the pumps, although they are designed to run 24/7 annual (or less frequent in actual practice) servicing, and there is a lot of off the shelf standard stuff for paralleling and dealing with pump failures. For comparison, I've seen estimates that every time an international flight is canceled for mechanical reasons, it costs the airline $40-50k. So yeah, the process of pumping down isn't going to cost that much compared to other frequent transportation costs, and ultimately it comes down to construction cost and what downtime and problems cause for lost ticket sales, etc.
The expansion joints thing is just another example of why you don't turn to a biochemist for a lecture on engineering. Most HSR doesn't have expansion joints either. Lots of things don't have expansion joints. There are three standard ways in industry to deal with thermal expansion: 1) resist it, 2) let it expand by increased bend radii, 3) let it expand by increased linear length. All three are widely used. In HSR, it's common practice to use the "resist" approach - they generally lay the track hot, so that when it cools it contracts and there's built-in tension on all but the hottest days. They usually use heavy and/or anchored ties (commonly concrete) to resist track movement. Pipelines generally use some combination of #1 (e.g. overburden anchoring), #2 (e.g. expansion loops) or #3 (e.g. slip-type expansion joints). Hyperloop wants to use #3, with the dampers as slip joints (e.g. like teflon shoes on pipelines). Whoop-de-doodle-doo. Even if that sort of thing wasn't already a common solution for thermal expansion, they could always just switch to resisting expansion, with a pretensioned tube, like the rail on HSR.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Check out Thunderf00t's analysis
That's like checking to see what Ben Carson thinks of the Pyramids.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is also taken out of context. They did not make the trains run on time. Not even close. My understanding is that it was usually sarcastic. Trains, and the fascists, just weren't that reliable.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You have a shockwave traveling down the tube at several hundred miles an hour until it encounters an obstacle; i.e., the train
There is no shockwave, as a shockwave is some discontinuity that requires a nonlinear steepening effect to propagate (e.g. heating from extremely high intensity compression... not decompression). As there is a distribution of different speed atoms and molecules in a gas, they tend to spread out and form a gradient that grows less steep with propagation.
1atm of pressure differential can be surmounted by the strength of modern building materials. There are many many things that can and likely will go wrong, but to say it's impossible is pretty insulting to all the talented engineers who've put people on the moon, on the bottom of challenger deep, flown stuff to mars, made modern microchips, etc. We could build a hyperloop if we set out to.
I helped design submarines. Big, long metal tubes which can withstand well over 50 atmospheres of external pressure. Designing a tube to withstand a single atmosphere is trivial.
And you don't design these things to be uniform in strength so if it fails, the entire cross-section buckles killing everyone inside. You deliberately design them with weaker sections. That way if there's ever a problem, a weaker section fails first and (for a submarine) gives the crew advance warning the hull is about to fail while allowing them time to recover, or (for an airplane or hyperloop) equalizes the pressure before the entire structure can fail.
I think Hyperloop is a boondoggle in California. But I could actually see it working for South Korea. They have an extremely high population density (lots of potential customers), the maximum travel distance in the country is annoyingly too short for airliner but too long for regular passenger trains, and the geography is incredibly stable (no earthquakes).
The expansion joints thing is just another example of why you don't turn to a biochemist for a lecture on engineering. Most HSR doesn't have expansion joints either. Lots of things don't have expansion joints
Incidentally, continuous rail is really, really cool.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Actually the only asian country so far is Thailand.
But the week that thing goes life I will be there and wait in the queues to be one of the first 10,000 to catch a ride.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
A car can not run in one. Perhaps google a bit for the concepts? ...
Submarines seem to survive baseball bats quite nicely, so do air planes
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
1atm of pressure differential can be surmounted by the strength of modern building materials.
This is the equivalent of a water depth of 10 meters (roughly 11 yards). So yes, it is trivial.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Fuck off
Is this a legitimate technology or the stuff of legend we will talk about when this generation's tech bubble burts?
A Hyperloop will be built, somewhere, but probably only as a novelty ride like to Las Vegas. It will be incredibly expensive, but Musk will pay because he wants his name on a flag. It will close when the novelty wears off and the maintenance gets expensive, joining the long list of other technological white elephants, like airships, Brunel's vacuum propelled trains*, and aircraft with flapping wings.
* Yes, yes, no relationship to the Hyperloop, no more than airships are.
How long is a submarine? How much does one cost?
It's quite a bit per mile, isn't it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is there anything that wouldn't be a boondoggle in California?
There is another expansion option that is kind of like an expansion loop and already used on vacuum systems: corrugation. There are a lot of vacuum systems that have parts cycling to cryogenic or high temps (sometimes in different parts of the same machine). Ideally you try to isolate that from the vacuum vessels, but it is not perfect, and often you want to heat up the vessel on purpose to remove water (200 C if using metal seals... With sometimes large gradients to parts that don't have metal seals). A variety of flexible bellows, varying by strength and flexibility, can expand and move, but not collapse under vacuum.
Why doesn't Elon get behind this?
http://www.skytran.com/
Hyperloop is a 'pipe' dream which will mostly serve the rich and only a very few with specific travel requirements. SkyTran would serve an entire City or Country with more then just personal public transportation. Run whatever cables/wires you want down the tracks and get fiber, gas, power and more. Every loading station could be a Wifi/Cellular node blanketing the area with open access. There is so much potential in a SkyTran system that it annoys me it doesn't get more exposure and I keep seeing an endless series of Hyperloop stories.
This submarine is 6000km long and cost $300m, so a submarine costs $2m per 10km.
Man, you really need that seminar!