201 MPH Pod Run Wins SpaceX's Second Hyperloop Competition (geekwire.com)

An anonymous reader quotes GeekWire: The speediest team from SpaceX founder Elon Musk's first Hyperloop pod competition has done it again: WARR Hyperloop from Germany's Technical University of Munich won today's second contest by sending its magnetic-levitation pod through a nearly mile-long test tunnel at a peak speed of 201 mph [video]. Musk announced WARR's victory to a crowd in the stands at SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and in a tweet... This weekend's competition brought about two dozen teams to Hawthorne, including a student group from the University of Washington. Each of the teams developed a pod that was designed to test engineering approaches for Musk's Hyperloop rapid-transit concept, which calls for sending people and cargo through low-pressure tubes at near-supersonic speeds.
Musk also tweeted that it "might be possible to go supersonic" in the 0.8-mile test Hyperloop tube, though he conceded it would require an extremely high acceleration (and deceleration) because of the short distance.

"For passenger transport, this can be spread over 20+ miles, so no spilt drinks."

Comments

Re:Much hidden energy cost.

[Rei]

Which is why the Hyperloop Alpha proposal was A) for a mild vacuum, not a hard vacuum, and B) did not use maglev. Specifically to address both of those issues.

This student competition is something entirely different. And each of the different companies which have taken on the "hyperloop" name are choosing their own technologies. But as for Hyperloop Alpha (the original proposal), it was very much about majorly reducing the cost of high-speed ground transport.

Re: So "Hyperloop" is a 200mph maglev?

[Rei]

1) Requirements for straightness on HSR and Hyperloop are the same, for a given speed. And there are standard solutions which very much work well for thermal expansion and are widely used in industry - either floating the object that would expand and allowing its expansion in a controlled manner, expansion joints, or resisting the expansion. Hyperloop Alpha proposed to use the first one, although any of the three could work. High speed rail generally uses the latter - pretensioned rail and heavy sleepers.

2) Building vacuum lines is no more complicated than building pressure lines, contrary what biochemists-pretending-to-be-engineers on Youtube would have you believe. There are standard guidelines and formulae for them, and no, a properly designed vacuum line does not suffer cascading failures.

Re:So "Hyperloop" is a 200mph maglev?

[TheRaven64]

At 1g acceleration, it takes around 11 seconds to travel half the distance in this tube (assuming that the other half is spent decelerating). That's a peak speed of 110m/s, or around 245 miles per hour, so this train had less horizontal acceleration than humans experience vertically just by being on this planet. Give them a comfy chair and they'll happily manage that level of acceleration for 30 seconds to a minute. And you can always trade a little bit time for comfort. Half the acceleration and accelerate for two minutes instead of one and you'll add two minutes (one at each end) to the total travel time, which won't make much difference in a half-hour journey.