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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?
This is the 21st century you white cisgendered Trumpist-pig.
There's no such thing as "failure" and the HyperLoop would simply get a participation trophy and be placed in the protected trans-functional class where you can't criticize it.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
you will die. really no ifs ands or buts about it.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I should think a hose and shovel should do the job nicely.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
Thunderfoot has done a series of videos on this topic. Even if you assume you could make a HUGE 99% perfect vaccuum with that volume of air; any failure causes its occupants to get exploded out the end somewhere. Lots and lots of energy in that system.
Realistically, at those speeds and at it's weight, it's probably going to go through whatever it hits.
Ok since Hyperloop is presurised ( no air in the tube ) if there's a leak its easy to detect pressure will drop rapidly so the train or pod will be forced to stop or at least decelerate since with air in the tube it wont be able to maintain its 700 MPH speed. So the tiniest leak should be pretty easy to know. Then its easy to stop the pod before something fatal happens. If the failure is mecanical well then it all depend on how they designed the thing to do. I suspect that there will be redudancy on all key systems and parts that are vitals. ( second sets of wheel in case primary fail and so on ) im pretty confident it will be safer than a train can be. Don't forget the environment is crutial for hyperloop so it will be monitored much closely This is not the case with a train. At the same time tho I dont think youll be spared anything you have in an airport. I mean an explosion would be as much devastating in a hyperloop than in a airplaine... can you imagine an explosion at 700 MPH how far would the debris goes!
Similarly, what if the vacuum failed and the pod stopped in a low pressure section pipe in the middle of nowhere. The only way out if to wait for someone to figure out the exact location of the pod and cut you out. I've yet to see an estimate for how many hours (days?) you might be stuck in there in pitch blackness, likely getting cooked inside a metal tube sitting in the sun.
Its this new fangled technology they call a HATCH DOOR every XYZ meters.
Crazy tech.
Trains derail because of a century-old standard makes them very badly attached to its rail. If you run into a tube, even if the tube cracks a bit, there is a good chance you still continue in the same direction the same way I can run peas in a straw with crack. I don't think catastrophic can't occur. I just think it's inherently more secure to run in a 360 degrees boundary tube than 2 littles track with no grip else than your own weight.
IF the system started to have a slow leak the pod would have time to slow, air resistance would do it naturally if nothing else.
Also it's not like it cannot have basically "landing gear" that would be able to slow the pod from 700 MPH in the perfectly smooth sealed tube in the case that a real breach presented itself - but you do all realize that a pressure breach would not be instantaneous across the enter length of the tube, right? Then we are back to the case where pressure changes can be reacted to and the system brought to a gradual halt.
I sweat Slashdot has become a bastion of luddite nut-jobs, who seem to purposefully ignore physics. Shameful to see such a virulent example of this on the home page.
You all sound like the people who wouldn't get into the first automobiles... or modern day Amish who still will not, but at least the Amish people are generally useful.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We don't know what will happen because it hasn't been engineered and built yet. Determining how it handles various types of failures will certainly be part of the engineering process. Worst case scenario is everyone dies, which isn't much different than a plane crash. But just like with a plane, plenty of fail safes will be there to allow for managed failures. Most catastrophic failures will probably just cause the train to come to a gradual halt.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Just wow...
Aircraft rarely hit anything in transit. They're not traveling through a confined space where a few feet of movement would mean disaster. Many mid-air accidents are survivable. There are solid statistics on it, but there are no real world stats on the hyperloop in this regard, obviously.
I think it's a very valid question, and it would be my primary concern as well. Traditional trains are very safe for their passengers, with very low occurrences of fatalities (the number of people killed by trains or in train related issues is much higher (people/cars stuck at crossings/stops, trespassing casualties, etc) than the number of passenger deaths). In the hyperloop scenario, I would expect far fewer related deaths, but if there is a collision/derailment/etc, what then!?!? I can't imagine it'd be pretty, and I'd be surprised if it didn't cause catastrophic damage to the tube as well.
FWIW, I'm sure the people involved are aware and/or have thought about this. I'm just curious what the result was.
I know that the /. crowd has moved to twitter length replies these days, but how about a real discussion?
There are plenty of failure modes that would be completely survivable, in fact with little or no chance of injury. Tube loses vacuum? Unit slows down and stops. Loss of mains power? Same. Capsule loses pressure integrity? Masks from the ceiling time.
Yes, a catastrophic failure of the tube structure could result in deaths, but I can see the emergency shutdown being engaged system wide in such a case, resulting in only a few affected capsules/trains. Mind you, there are advantages to the many capsules/fewer passengers per capsule. A single failure is unlikely to approach aviation disaster numbers. Wiki Aviation Accidents.
Most of the risks are similar to high speed rail, and those seem to have been well mitigated by current operators in Europe and Japan. Now, the chances of the system getting built at all? I don't see it surviving contact with investors, incumbent system operators or property owners.
Too soon.
That's ok, I'm game to start one. First we need to define the hyperloop as a system.
Next, we imagine, and list all of the possible failure modes for each one.
Rapid depressurization
Rapid depressurization
Thermal event
Explosive event
Then we discuss the effect of each failure mode, and steps that can be taken to mitigate it... Completing an FMEA usually takes hours in meetings with large numbers of engineers brainstorming all of the possibilities.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
It would make Hypergoop.
Ask a Medical Doctor in 1820 what would happen if a steam locomotive crashed... all manner of mayhem, injury and likely death - that's what the experts all said. Falling off a running horse is bad enough, but the speeds that are possible with rail transportation are far worse.
True...
BUT, being that the whole path of the Hyperloop will be ground based, there will be MANY more points of attack along the route by those with terroristic minded activities to plan.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Worst case scenario is everyone dies, which isn't much different than a plane crash.
Evidently you aren't aware that 95.7% of surviving an accident in a plane. The vast majority of people actually do survive. When the National Transportation Safety Board studied accidents between 1983 and 2000 involving 53,487 passengers, they found that 51,207 survived.
It's unclear what the statistics might be for hyperloop but assuming instant fiery death is probably not going to be correct for the majority of failure modes.
Unlike a train or plane, a hyperloop is an enclosed tube where collisions *should* be non-existent unless you put multiple cars in the same tube. The most likely failure is likely stalling in which case you will need to have some way of extracting the stalled car but everyone should be uninjured. The mostly likely fatal failure would likely be a break in the tube causing a derailment and the closest we have to that would be roller coasters and large oil pipelines. Looking at the failure rate of large oil pipelines and roller coaster derailment should give a pretty good idea of the failure rate of a hyperloop.
Hatch doors... which would be separate failure points along the way for the pressure difference to be changed.
Assume perfect seals and no malicious or accidental misuse of even a single hatch door. A tech team is sent out to to assist the passengers in getting out. You can't just open the hatch, you've 14.7 lbs of pressure per square inch trying to keep that door closed, assuming it swings out. Now you've got to pressurize either the entire system (so largely shutting it down), or the particular leg you are on. How long does this take? Now how long does it take to undo these steps?
Short of a 9/11, when there is an airplane crash, even an entire airport (or state) is shut down due to weather, the rest of the system keeps going.
This also aside from all of the issues related to thermal expansion & contraction of the materials, making the sealing even more difficult.
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I came across this Reddit discussion for their entry in the hyperloop competition. It includes a spreadsheet and comments about various failure modes and mitigations. page 1, page 2.
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Aircraft tend to run into the ground when something goes wrong.
Richard Hammond was doing 288 mph... That said, hyperloops look like death traps to me.
Air fills the vacuum at the speed of sound.
Yes, exactly. Sound is not all that fast (six seconds to travel just a mile), mostly the pod would be so remote from the source of the leak it would have plenty of time to slow down to a reasonable speed before substantial pressure reached it. Also if we are talking about small leak its not like it would INSTANTLY be a huge volume of air in front of the pod, it would be a gradual loss of vacuum and therefore simply not the "wall of air" you are scare-mongering about.
And of course, the leak would have to occur in front of a moving pod instead of behind it to even be that much of a potential danger...
A wall of air hitting you at that speed would likely kill you.
Not at 70MPH instead of 700MPH, you blithering retard.
Also I've not seen any arguments for why emergency vacuum pumps placed along the tube would help eliminate the danger from common leaks? But you didn't even think that far you were just like YABBER YABBER YABBER FLOOM DOOM!! *throws hands in air and waves frantically like muppet on acid*
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Trains are hundreds of tons and carry immense amounts of momentum and energy. A hyperloop pod would be very light, possibly weighing much less than the cargo it carries. Even airplanes are not a great comparison as they are orders of magnitude bigger and heavier than a pod. Some other fundamental differences, the pilot is not on board in a pod, a pod does not carry it's fuel. Pods will be MUCH safer for the area around the crash, and MUCH more dangerous for the passenger/s. Of course an accident could be survivable, and highly dependent on the type of accident: slow depressurization of the tube, you will slow down and be fine. blockage in the tube or fast depressurization, you will explode.
Actually, I suspect the most likely fatal failure is going to be loss of passenger pressurization, resulting in *loss of cargo*. Cabin depressurization of an airplane is bad, but still not as bad as being exposed to total vacuum, and a plane can dive to regain air pressure. When a hyperloop pod looses pressure, there's no place to run.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Perhaps a more salient question is sabotage.
Explosive charges attached to the tube that detonated five seconds before the arrival of a pod would likely kill everyone on board.
Yes, but Earth is in constant orbit around the Sun. If the plane was close enough to the edge, it would simply go over and float down to one of the turtles.
Trolling is a art,
The space station's pressure, such as ISS, is kept at sea level (kind of surprised, but...). That means that you have 101 kPa of pressure differential, on THIN ALUMINUM.
Seriously, all of the space stations have had leaks. Most were caused by micrometeorites that hit them. How many have blown apart because of that? NONE.
For those that are claiming that hyperloop will blow up, note that the tubes will actually be STRONGER than any of the stations.
And for those claiming that physicists are saying otherwise, I would suggest that they are NOT working in the field since they are too stupid to know.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Engineers tend to think statistically -- which is a good thing. But it can produce judgments which are contrary to common intuition. That's because intuition is, from an engineering standpoint, crap.
Take automobiles. Three thousand Americans die annually in cars -- that's like a 9/11 attack every year. Plus car accidents produce a bountiful annual crop of disfigurations and crippling injuries. Yet nobody is concerned about getting in a car. Planes on the other hand are much safer. Now as an engineer trained to use numbers as your yardstick, the natural way of thinking is this: "Since cars are acceptably safe to the public, if I can get the deaths/mile figures for airplanes down to the same level my job is done." Except that plane failures are often spectacularly horrific. People are naturally terrified of them. It's common sense to be afraid of something that moves at hundreds of mile per hour thousands of feet in the air.
So people demand very high levels of safety for aviation, which drives the cost of air travel up. OK, then; that means rationally they should also want the same deal for automobiles, which are by every measure much more dangerous. Except no, every time someone proposes making safety improvements people resist the cost, even though on a dollar per life saved basis the make much more sense than trying to make airliners even safer.
Conclusion: the natural human emotional response to risk and cost is hopelessly borked.
Now the Hyperloop is a novel form of transportation, and our bias against novelty when it comes to fear means that people will demand it be designed to be much safer than air travel even. And by design it probably is. But given the physical nature of the thing, lurking out on the tail end of the probability curve there are no doubt potential events of spectacular carnage. But they are so unlikely that given the number of people who are expected to ride the system it makes no sense.
I don't know specifically what those scenarios are; I'm not a Hyperloop engineer. But if they do exist it may be that I'm literally better off knowing.
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The whitepaper described how to handle loss of pressure in the pod. Basically it boiled down to this:
1) If the leak is small enough, compensate with onboard emergency air supply until the destination is reached
2) If the leak is big enough, initiate a system-wide emergency stop and rapidly repressurize the tube.
You could arguably repressurize the tube faster than an aircraft could descend to a safe altitude.
Engineers tend to think statistically -- which is a good thing. But it can produce judgments which are contrary to common intuition. That's because intuition is, from an engineering standpoint, crap.
Take automobiles. Three thousand Americans die annually in cars -- that's like a 9/11 attack every year. Plus car accidents produce a bountiful annual crop of disfigurations and crippling injuries. Yet nobody is concerned about getting in a car. Planes on the other hand are much safer. Now as an engineer trained to use numbers as your yardstick, the natural way of thinking is this: "Since cars are acceptably safe to the public, if I can get the deaths/mile figures for airplanes down to the same level my job is done." Except that plane failures are often spectacularly horrific. People are naturally terrified of them. It's common sense to be afraid of something that moves at hundreds of mile per hour thousands of feet in the air.
So people demand very high levels of safety for aviation, which drives the cost of air travel up. OK, then; that means rationally they should also want the same deal for automobiles, which are by every measure much more dangerous. Except no, every time someone proposes making safety improvements people resist the cost, even though on a dollar per life saved basis the make much more sense than trying to make airliners even safer.
Conclusion: the natural human emotional response to risk and cost is hopelessly borked.
Now the Hyperloop is a novel form of transportation, and our bias against novelty when it comes to fear means that people will demand it be designed to be much safer than air travel even. And by design it probably is. But given the physical nature of the thing, lurking out on the tail end of the probability curve there are no doubt potential events of spectacular carnage. But they are so unlikely that given the number of people who are expected to ride the system it makes no sense.
I don't know specifically what those scenarios are; I'm not a Hyperloop engineer. But if they do exist it may be that I'm literally better off knowing.
It has nothing to do with statistics or common sense.
It has to do with control. Getting into a car meaning you or the person you trust to drive you has a great deal of control over the situation, from driving to knowing the reliability of the vehicle to avoiding external threats from other idiots on the road. Getting into the plane means you have no control and have to trust a stranger for everything.
It depends on the kind of failure. I am sure that the designers will make every effort to make the more likely failures (power loss, reasonable or minor track damage, etc.) survivable. You won't ever have many of the risks associated with conventional trains (inattentive conductors, cars or other obstructions on the track, excessive speed for the track, etc.) That said, if a terrorist blows up the track just short of the train in motion (less than stopping distance) you are very likely going to be red paste in the wreckage.
Compare the risk of death in an airplane:
loss of power - very likely everyone dies unless there is a runway nearby
any failure that causes loss of control - everyone dies
etc.
The main problem I see with the hyperloop is that in this era of terrorism, it is virtually impossible to secure hundreds of miles of tracks, whereas airports are fairly well secured, and planes are immune to terrorist attack from outside while in flight (so far terrorists haven't managed to design and build stinger missiles, fighter jets or SAM missile batteries.)
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
By that logic people would be terrified to take a taxi or an Uber. And you really don't have control if some drunk in the oncoming lane swerves into yours; your fate is up to pure luck.
The notion of "control" I think is just rationalizing familiarity bias.
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If the vacuum is breached behind the train, it might accelerate first then crash and stop.
Because air pressure behind and less pressure in front, for a while.
To prevent this, you might want an automated emergency system to vent in front of a train (increase pressure there) if pressure is increasing at back of it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?