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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
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
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".
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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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
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 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.