Bridging Divides
A nearly frictionless transportation tube is in development that will transport pods at 760 mph. In the near future, it could help connect major cities throughout the world.
Over 1,200 teams from different universities around the world applied to compete in a SpaceX competition to create their own models of the fastest transportation pods in the world. The models were meant to replicate the Hyperloop, a high-speed pod that travels through a frictionless, steel vacuum tube at speeds up to 760 mph. This would make a trip from Seattle to Portland possible in a mere 15 minutes, or Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes.
University of Washington created a team of dedicated students to compete and became finalists in the international competition. Malachi Williams and David Coven are the student directors of the UW Hyperloop team and have been involved since the beginning in 2015. They heard about SpaceX’s competition while they were interning at Boeing and immediately wanted to be involved.
Born in Tacoma, Williams has seen how bad traffic is on Interstate 5 and knows how much a Hyperloop track could help with congestion. He has always admired Elon Musk and SpaceX and wanted to join the competition for the engineer and business experience — building the pod, but also pitching the idea and model to potential sponsors.
They called for their fellow UW peers to join them and conducted interviews to form a diverse team of 22 students. The majority of the team are engineer majors (including mechanical, electrical and computer science engineers), but the team also consists of business, psychology and design students as well. Williams said the team would clock in around 70 hours of week per week.
“We’re geared up with a strong and lean team of about 20 students and are taking things from a first principles approach. One of my favorite components is that while we have amazingly esteemed faculty, the entire nature of the project is student driven. The design, conceptualization, manufacturing, and analysis is all run by students. Giving us the best of both worlds, support from some of the finest, and a chance to flex our engineering muscles for the world to see,” Williams said.
The Hyperloop concept was designed in 2014 by a team of aerospace engineers — including Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal — from Los Angeles who have worked for the past several years to create a high-speed transit system capable of giving people back the gift of time.
The fundamental design for the Hyperloop is a pod traveling through suspended steel tubes with reduced air pressure for a frictionless ride. Fans and custom electric motors push the pods and slow them down with no turbulence.
“The world is ready for a new mode of transportation that will change the way we live. We’re in the business of selling time, the most precious resource there is. When cities become metro stops, regions will flourish,” the Hyperloop website states.
Future plans have started to snowball for the Hyperloop. They plan to test the full system this year then have cargo shipments up and running in 2020, making it available for transportation of public passengers in 2021. They are planning to expand to five other countries and are researching underwater installations that would connect continents.
SpaceX announced their pod design competition for university students in 2015. “The purpose of the competition was to help accelerate the development of functional prototypes and encourage student innovation by challenging university students to design and build the best high-speed pod. This competition is the first of its kind anywhere in the world,” the Hyperloop SpaceX website says.
After the competition was announced in 2015, the applications flooded in. A preliminary design review narrowed down the pool to 1,200 teams throughout the world. SpaceX then hosted a design weekend in January 2016 where 150 teams could pitch their ideas at Texas A&M to a panel of judges who included SpaceX engineers and the engineering faculty from Texas A&M.
With the Hyperloop being such a new concept, the design process for the UW team included mostly trial and error, said Williams. They studied roller coasters and maglev trains from China and Japan for design inspiration.
The first competition was scored on scalability, cost per unit mass, lack of vibrations or friction, and safety factors. From there, they selected 30 teams to continue on for next year for the final competition, which just happened this year in January at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. This competition was strictly focused on speed — making the fast pod possible.
Delft University from the Netherlands won best overall score. Technical University of Munich received second place with the fastest time and MIT came in third. UW scored sixth in the world, and fourth in the US.
Originally, Williams thought the competition would be very competitive and formal, without much interaction from the other teams. However, it ended up being quite the opposite. All the teams were very open about communication and shared their designs and their process for coming up with the ideas. Everyone shared phone numbers and contact information, Williams said. “It was really a positive environment.”
From here, Williams and the UW Hyperloop team plan to continue to compete in the Hyperloop competition. They will take their feedback from the SpaceX team and judges to go back to build a more efficient and faster pod. After competing and talking with other teams and the judges, they have a better idea of how to move forward.
“Building upon our success at competition one, our plan moving forward is to start from square one and redesign the pod around the winning criteria for competition two, speed. To do this, we are conducting trade studies to verify what combination of systems will work best for us to build a lighter and faster pod. We believe increasing our use of carbon fiber will be key to saving weight, as well. Competition two will be held this summer, and as the only Hyperloop team from the Pacific northwest, we’re looking to really build a partnership between education, engineering, and the institutions that support us,” Williams said.
Williams graduates in the spring and plans to see the Hyperloop competition to the end, becoming an advisor for the team after he graduates. He is excited to see the team move forward.