无忧视频

Creating a Human-Scale Hyperloop Pod

Share story

Ten 无忧视频 students have joined forces with students from Cornell University, Northeastern University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Princeton University, and University of Michigan聽to try and build a Hyperloop pod that will compete in . Teresa Despres 鈥18, Alex Goldstein 鈥18, Hamza Khan 鈥18, Chris Kotcherha 鈥18, Jessica Lupanow 鈥18, Patrick McKeen 鈥17, Jeewan Naik 鈥17, Adam Shaw 鈥18, In Sung Song 鈥16 and Hannah Zosman 鈥17聽 have been working on the project design this semester, with guidance from engineering professors Chris Clark and Liz Orwin ’95.

Last June, SpaceX announced that it would be hosting a competition to design and build a Hyperloop pod. The competition is targeted toward university students and independent engineering teams with the goal of accelerating progress toward a functional Hyperloop pod prototype.聽The Hyperloop is a high-speed ground transportation system. The idea is basically to create a really long tube that a special pod can travel through at extremely high speeds. This would allow people to travel from city to city very quickly. However, many of the logistics of such a system still need to be worked out.

That鈥檚 where the competition comes in. Teams all over the country are currently working to design a pod that could travel in such a tube. Next semester, qualifying聽teams will build their human-scale pods and eventually bring them to the mile-long test track outside of SpaceX headquarters for testing.

鈥淲hile it鈥檚 a challenging problem,鈥 Adam Shaw said, 鈥淗yperloop gives us the opportunity to apply learning from multiple disciplines to a real-world problem with the potential to make a lasting impact on global transport.鈥澛燭he Mudders on the Hyperloop team have been working specifically on the controls system and will be traveling to Texas to in January. They hope to be one of the teams selected to actually build their pod and to be able to test it in real life next June.

This post was first published by Jacey Coniff ’18 for The Muddraker聽 on Dec. 6, 2015