Winning Hyperloop design revealed by MIT engineers
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From the lift to drag ratio(14) and cruising speed provided(110 m/s), we can compare it's performance to other forms of transportation(neglecting air drag) using the Von Karmen Gabrielli diagram[0]. Using the inverse of the L/D ratio as the specific tractive power and using the updated Von Karmen Gabrielli diagram in [1], we find that performance is expected to be a bit better than that of a commercial plane.
This is pretty promising. Although power required for stabilization and overcoming air drag should be taken into account.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n%E2%80%93G... [1]http://www.ingenia.org.uk/Content/ingenia/issues/issue22/Imp...
But wasn't the ambition to go much faster than a train? I thought this was about reaching speeds of airplanes...
If we are at speeds around or below 200 mph when the pods are full, SF - LA would still take a couple of hours. A French wheeled TGV could have done that 35 years ago. A Japanese wheeled Shinkansen could have done that even before. A Japanese or Chinese maglev version of the last 1-2 decades could easily beat that. And that's without being stuck in a dumb tube. By the time the hyperloop becomes a reality, if ever, there will be tens of thousands of miles of high speed rails around the world.
The hyperloop is a sizeable amount of current hype and a future loop with pods that barely match yesterday's high speed trains. These high speed trains, engineering wonders that actually exist, don't receive any attention in press. I'd say that the hyperloop has been remarkably good at sucking the air out of the room.
The Wright Flyer was slower than a contemporary ship, let alone a train, yet this technology quickly became the fastest transportation available.
Hyperloop is supposed to average about 600MPH and hit a top speed of 760MPH. Now, that's a far-off estimate of something totally unproven and could be way off, but if you're going to compare it to alternatives you need to compare what it will become, not what it currently is. You might disagree on what it could become (I have no idea how much of the supposed specs are feasible and how much is just wishful thinking, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it couldn't achieve its goals) but you can't just look at some first-try barely-works prototype and assume that's the end state.
The Wright Flyer was far cheaper than the Hyperloop will be to develop, and airplanes had uses beyond just transporting people (namely military, which meant government-subsidized development).
Your comment makes sense, when applied to the first commercial deployment. Which is years out at best and nobody knows what it would really look like. This stuff right now is not even a prototype, it's barely a proof of concept. Complaining about the specs is on essentially the same level as taking a wind-tunnel model of an airliner and saying that it's not big enough to fit any people.
On very few select tracks – the Shinkansen could drive 500 km/h, but is still limited to 320 because of a lack of suitable high-speed tracks. Same goes for the TGV, and the Germans don't even bother with trains faster than 250 km/h.
Speaking of which, Germany sold their maglev technology to Japan and China in the first place because there was nowhere to put it at all. With Germany's winding railroad network it's impossible to reach speeds high enough to justify maglev.
400 km/h sustained, over tracks longer than 400km, would already be a massive improvement over the status quo.
Assuming, of course, the Hyperloop will be able to build a sufficient rail/tube network.
Given that assumption, existing trains could also sustain something in the vicinity of 400 km/h by your own words.
Germany rebuilt and supplemented some of its railroad network for the ICE, at enormous cost (e.g. Wikipedia says the 250 km from Hannover to Berlin cost around 2.5 billion EUR, not adjusting for inflation). Of course that's nothing compared to rebuilding an entire transit network from scratch. I'm not sure any western country has even attempted to do that post-WW2, I guess China's recent investment into high speed rail is the closest modern example.
Another interesting point of comparison with existing rail networks aside from average speed is efficiency. A well utilised high speed train is more efficient than a car, but it still uses a heck of a lot of energy (with corresponding emissions, somewhere). Given the reductions in drag, I'd assume -- hope -- that a Hyperloop train will use less energy per passenger kilometer than existing trains.
Maybe the hyperloop can do sharper turns at high speed, and probably next generation of the pods or the loop allows for higher speed in general. But that the winner of the first attempts promises 396 km/h and not the +1,000 km/h we heard about before, does deflate the whole idea.
This essentially removes the requirement of flat land from the equation.
Also, remember that the hyperloop is really much more geared towards the American need: large cities are separated by much greater distances than Europe, meaning that a faster and cheaper per kilometer solution is needed than high speed rail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_railway_line#/media...
There is a huge project upgrading existing railway tracks throughout Germany to make it possible getting from Berlin to Munich in under 4h by 2017.
So selected, in fact, that the DB is currently procuring over 300 ICEs limited to 250 km/h, and a grand total of 17 (with an option of up to two more!) that peak at 320 km/h.
I'll call myself lucky if the train manages 180 km/h on my usual routes.
They are not a replacement for those trains running fast services (with legs with 300 km/h in them).
Meanwhile, the more ubiquitous current 280 km/h models are scheduled to be replaced with a more economical 250 km/h one – and they won't even reach 200 km/h on most tracks.
ICx / ICE 4 are meant to replace the IC/EC trains first (which are slower than ICx) and later ICE 1 and 2. It seems that their slightly lower top speed shouldn't matter because of improved ac-/deceleration and relatively frequent stops (every ~70km). ICE 3 would do the 300km/h bits with longer distances. That seems like a good idea to me.
I'd like to ask on a source for your claim that ICE 3 "are scheduled to be reduced even further." The series 407 trains are just being rolled out.
Also, by definition most tracks will always be slow because there are many local / less-used tracks where such speeds simply don't make sense. Most long-distance tracks are pretty fast, and lots of upgrades are being built or in planning. I find your point misleading.
Could that be a positive feature, though?
It seems that in America, and particularly in CA where they're currently arguing heatedly about light rail, there are interests that have captured the industry - it's impossible to construct and operate these conventional technologies for anything short of insane amounts of money.
Perhaps it's possible to sidestep all the rent-protecting regulations, etc., by making the conversation about a technology whose regulation has not been thoroughly captured.
Hyperloop is a heavy rail competition and the one planned in California is a disaster on many fronts, it is pure political in need and desire and hasn't got a viable economic case.
The only reason I would see to support a hyperloop is that if it is commercial driven and supported. We don't need more of the same, we need a real game changer that shows true potential to replace other long distance forms of transport.
With regards to rail, for all the belly aching about the US not having a large number of people traveling by that means you need to realize that the US by far makes up for this with the freight that moves this way. Also for a much longer time the US had a much cheaper and easier transport by plane than Europe has but even now that is ramped up and continuing to do so.
We are not even at the prototype stage. This is still the design stage, and of only a single design to boot. Do not expect 110 m/s to be the maximum speed limit of this technology. We're just barely getting started.
The potential to go much, much faster is still there.
The winning design is a maglev.
Evacuating the tubes would be far easier on the moon or on Mars.
http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_t...
The Hyperloop uses a low pressure tunnel, that's critical and the system would not work with a vacuum tunnel. The air in the tunnel is blown below the car to provide a low friction interface, much like an air hockey table (but with the puck providing the air, not the table). Linear induction motors in sections of the track accelerate or decelerate the cars, with gliding in between.
This is a new idea, and it's a highly useful idea because the vast majority of the track is just a pressure vessel, while the friction reducing components are fairly low tech and on the pod and the acceleration components are only on small sections of track, and potentially solar powered during peak hours. This lowers the cost of construction enormously while enabling speeds approaching that of commercial air travel.
I could go door to door from my house in Santa Clara to my office in Burbank in about an hour.
Though in Musk's case I imagine he can do the private jet thing and have the plane wait for him.
Then just enough time for a drink service and you head back down, to do it all over again in reverse.
more videos about the event: http://hyperloop.tamu.edu/media-kit/
The hyperloop concept has been around at least since George Medhurst wrote about it in 1812.
Yes, he had the team at his disposal, but it didn't just gain attention because he has a recognisable name.
If it's not plausible to pave, why would it be plausible to build an elevated, evacuated tube on stilts?
> Evacuating the tubes would be far easier on the moon or on Mars.
But probably not easier than just driving off-road, as we've already done https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle
edit: rewording
The rest are all good questions
Notwithstanding, this is a distraction from the biggest problem, which is that a decompression of one vehicle will require recompression of the entire segment of the hyperloop, stopping all vehicles in the segment.
At the ambient near-vacuum pressure inside the hyperloop, humans cannot survive for more than a few seconds even with supplemental pressurized oxygen masks. There is absolutely no way to deal with the decompression of a single vehicle other than (a) recompress the loop or (b) plan for the occupants to be dead by the next stop.
The problem is not even decompression itself. Any failure of a sensor or failure of communication with the vehicle for more than about 1s must be interpreted as a decompression, with shutdown of the loop, because to do otherwise is to plan for the death of the occupants.
Commercial travel at very low ambient pressures has significant caveats. A plan to deal with these is going to be central to wide acceptance of the system. This is the greatest design challenge of the hyperloop.
Extremely rapidly.
The PG motto is more relevant than ever: make something people want. In that case, make something that people will want in their backyard. Selling is the hard part.
It might very well be that they should have spent more effort on that aspect, but they didn't ignore it.
And the PG motto is great if you want to make money as fast as possible with as little risk as possible. It's not nearly so great if your goal is to make a major change to society.
Following the highway network is great (and Germany largely does it for HSR) but the highway system is designed with very different constraints. That might be possible in largely desert or rural places without a lot of topography, but highways have curves and slopes incompatible with high speed as soon as you hit a significant topography.
The cost of right-of-way skyrockets in urban and dense environments that are exactly the ones you want to serve with HSR/HyperLoop. Both systems are on par in the regard. The mile-long tunnel to bring HSR in the heart of San Francisco is expected to cost several billion dollars. The cost of the technical equipment of that infrastructure for conventional rail is marginal compared to the cost of digging the tunnel itself.
Sure we could solve that, with strong eminent domain powers for the state for instance. But I'm not sure anyone wants that, nor that the Supreme Court would let it happen.
Good luck getting a closed tube through a municipality, let alone a major city, let alone across an entire state.
This is the first result of any actual serious thought being given (well actually a bunch of college senior projects) and the winning design already apparently had to cut the speeds by a third (which makes it no faster than a train) and has no space for passengers or cargo.
Let me repeat that: the first serious proposal is no faster than a train and can't actually be used for transporting anything. Making it, as a suggestion for high speed transport, completely useless.
Yes, although this can be handwaved away by saying it's not a full-scale model and the test track is too short for higher speeds.
What I find more interesting is that the winning design isn't even true Hyperloop, as the air hockey suspension is replaced by maglev. There's no air intake on the front because magnets are used.
The winning design doesn't validate the Hyperloop concept since it replaces a critical element and becomes just a maglev in a tube with a rail. It wouldn't surprise me if the tube disappeared in the next iteration.
Hyperloop is a low-latency low-capacity transport method.
It's not much better at latency/cost than a VacTrain or a regular MagLev, but basically has less than 10% of the capacity.
Basically, the Hyperloop will be a transport method used by a bunch of rich people, not by the ten thousands or hundredthousands of people who'd use a HSR or MagLev on the same route.
The guy makes assumption of single 28 person pod leaving every 30 second to get 3360 passengers/hour throughput. But these parameters are not set in stone. Pods could be joined into platoons that move together to form "trains". With 10 pod platoon you get 33600 passenger/hour -- neary 3x throughput of California High Speed rail when it's built. Pods could also be made wider to accommodate multiple people along cross-section.
From the linked document:
> So what’s the value of getting the vibration mode shapes of this little section of the Hyperloop? Simple: it makes pretty pictures you can put in your proposal.
and
> Nothing in this section of the proposal has “demonstrated the capability of the Hyperloop,” nor was it intended to. This is not simply an error. This is eyewash for the rubes, the surest sign you’re dealing with a snake oil salesman.
And now the winning design from MIT drops the air hockey suspension for conventional magnetic levitation.
The purpose of Hyperloop isn't to build a fast, new LA-SF link, it's to kill the California High-Speed Rail project. It's a classic case of FUD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
Right now this is just a fancy maglev.
Precisely. There are no air intakes on the nosecone. None needed, since there's no air hockey suspension.
I'm surprised more people didn't notice this. I was shocked when I saw the change.
The Best Overall Design Award was given by SpaceX to a design that's not Hyperloop as we know it—just a maglev in a tube.
Nothing revolutionary, has existed for many decades as concept.
Moving the air from front to back (with a pump) is needed to compensate for being in a partial vacuum rather than a true vacuum. Without the air pump you don't have a hyperloop. You just have a maglev in a tunnel.
I never implied that moving the air provided the motion.
We already have a trans- (and inter-) continental system that works quite well for transporting smaller packages faster than trains.
Can you explain the benefit of faster solutions to package delivery over the proposed network? Coast to coast is not likely given the layout. Many of the regions shown already have a network of supply centers that serve the local area. It seems like a much better investment would be automated delivery vehicles for the terminal delivery phase.
> you don't have to fill a whole jetliner to make it cost effective.
Is there a reference in any of the documents that show the cost of shipping good via the hyperloop? Is there any references to maximum capacity of the hyperloop given safe distances between cars?
You said "cargo doesn't care how fast it gets to the destination". Well, some cargo does. You also said the cargo system is larger than the passenger system. Well, that just means there's obviously demand and maybe Musk should have put that in his white paper.
You're sure it'll never happen, I'm suggesting it might. Not that it will, just that you're a bit too confident in your position, considering it's a bet against out ability to innovate around problems.
Are the current domain of trucks that have a lot more access than any hyperloop is going to have.
> You said "cargo doesn't care how fast it gets to the destination". Well, some cargo does.
The speed difference between truck and a new hyperloop-based system is not going to be enough to justify the complications involved in including another element. Automation is going be the governing innovation, not a hyperloop.
> You also said the cargo system is larger than the passenger system. Well, that just means there's obviously demand and maybe Musk should have put that in his white paper.
Yes, its much bigger and the US has been optimizing for it for a long time. The demand is being met in a variety of ways with self-driving and drones being the next, more flexible step. I am pretty sure that's why its not in the white paper.
> You're sure it'll never happen, I'm suggesting it might. Not that it will, just that you're a bit too confident in your position, considering it's a bet against out ability to innovate around problems.
I not betting against innovation, I'm betting against the premise that we have a problem that further automation (e.g. self driving vehicles) and drones won't take care of. I see it very much like putting a generator on a bicycle to warm the handlebars[1] as opposed to just wearing gloves.
1) http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Glove...
We are getting downvoted by people who don't get the current system and haven't even read the paper and why supersonic planes are needed for distance.
The big thing is that these will travel much faster.
The MIT system is maglev against a passive track. The Transrapid system, used in the Shanghai airport maglev, requires an active track, which is why it's so expensive. Maglev with a passive track means a simpler track but high power consumption on the vehicle. Power has to be supplied to the vehicle in some way. MIT is using batteries, which is fine for a 1 mile run, but doesn't scale.
The Incheon airport maglev just started service yesterday. It's not high speed rail, but it's much faster than most airport trams.
They can't magically increase battery lifetime, and that's why Hyperloop will either end up as Transrapid in vacuum (VacTrain, concept for many decades) or not at all.
(I don’t know if you have ever used High Speed Rail, but usually it’s a direct city-city transport, only connecting the largest cities in the region, and often going for a long time uninterrupted. Many countries, like Germany and Japan, even decided to put HSR onto completely separate rails)
You'd still need a last-mile delivery but you could do warehouse to warehouse transfers in an hour instead of days.
There are couple difference designs that will be tested at Design Weekend, including the air bearings proposed in the alpha paper along with magnets and wheels.
For fuck's sake, can people at least read the wikipedia entry on the topic before commenting on it?
It uses an air cushion to reduce friction, it uses linear induction motors to accelerate trains along a route, most of the time it will cost. That means the fixed costs of the whole thing are low. The cars are pretty simple and low cost. The accelerators are also simple and make up a tiny fraction of the length of a track. Most of the track is just a partially evacuated tunnel, which is cheaper to build than a maglev track.
Oh wow, this is too much.
From the article:
> "The MIT pod has magnet skis that lift it during high-speed cruising"
So, in your own words, "For fuck's sake, can people at least read the article before commenting on it?"
The was the whole reason I brought it up. The original design called for air bearings; the MIT team did something apparently far more expensive. This is concerning.
Any with air bearings or magnets both being a passive track on-going costs might favor the one geological events disrupt less.
Although the Hyperloop concept uses an air cushion for levitation, the winning pod from MIT was indeed levitated by magnets: http://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-students-win-first-round-spacex...