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Ask Slashdot: What Would Happen If a Hyperloop Train Failed?
dryriver writes: I've been following Elon Musk's Hyperloop initiative with great interest. The idea of getting from one city to another at 700 MPH without having to suffer through an airport and all that jazz is revolutionary. I'm glad that somebody is trying to innovate in the area of land travel. My question though: When conventional trains going at much slower speeds derail or crash, the result is often serious injuries or deaths. What happens if something goes wrong with a 700 MPH Hyperloop train/pod or with part of the track? Would a Hyperloop accident at that speed even be survivable?
Agreed... just like plane crashes, it could be catastrophically bad, but also just like plane crashes, it would probably be so rare that it's still safer than driving.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
We know exactly what will happen. The problem isn't the tube losing its pressure seal. Air is compressible, so it makes a great shock absorber (in fact that is exactly how some shock absorbers are designed - with a gas at one end of a cylinder being pressurized).
The problem is trains moving at high speed tends to do bad things when they hit a stationary solid object. The Eschede derailment probably would've only had a dozen or so fatalities due to losing a wheel at 200 kph. In fact, the wheel failure was in the first car, but the engine and first four cars survived relatively intact, scraping the bridge supports but coasting to a stop or derailing and hitting some trees (the guy sitting above the wheel which failed survived despite being out of seat showing the wheel to the conductor when the accident happened). The bridge collapsed onto the 5th car, causing the rapid deceleration of all subsequent cars. That's where all the fatalities occurred. It was just bad luck the train happened to be passing underneath a bridge just as the accident occurred.
Now, consider that with a hyperloop train, the cars will be traveling at speed a few inches from the stationary wall for the entire length of the track. It's not an air leak you need to worry about. It's an IED-type device placed on the side of the track wall, designed to blow it inwards just before the train arrives. At 700 MPH the explosive only needs enough energy to blow enough of the wall inwards to destroy the first train car causing it to block the subsequent cars. The kinetic energy of the train itself will then be more than sufficient to destroy it. When US Air 427 hit the ground at just 300 MPH, its kinetic energy was enough to shred all the metal into pieces smaller than a sheet of paper. United 93 hit the ground at 563 MPH, and its kinetic energy fragmented the plane into such small pieces that conspiracy theorists (who can't seem to grasp the notion that solid metal will fragment when presented with no other means of shedding kinetic energy) have gone nuts with theories that no plane actually crashed there.
A hyperloop train is going to have more than 4x the kinetic energy per unit mass of US Air 427, 1.5x that of United 93. If one strikes the wall and crashes, it kinetic energy is literally going to turn it (and its occupants) into confetti.
What makes it more dangerous than a plane is that planes fly miles away from the nearest solid object when they're at top speed (mid-air collisions excepted). Even systems designed to cause a deliberate collision (surface to air missiles) have a high failure rate. OTOH Hyperloop is going to be traveling a few inches from the nearest stationary object the entire length of its trip. So you're now faced with the prospect of protecting the entire length of track from vandalism or terrorism.