Hate commuting? Imagine, instead, your train carriage hurtling down a tunnel at the same speed as a commercial jet airliner. That’s the dream of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. His Hyperloop system would see ‘train’ passengers travel at up to 760mph through a vacuum tube, propelled by compressed air and induction motors.
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Make no mistake, Hyperloop is potentially the biggest innovation in transportation in a century—since the commercialization of air travel. It’s going to make hundred-mile journeys faster, easier, and cheaper. While today’s bullet trains travel at 200 miles per hour and commercial airplanes cruise at 500-600 mph, the Hyperloop has projected speeds of 700-800 mph.
The pods will get their velocity from an external linear electric motor comes in; effectively a round induction motor (like the one in the Tesla Model S) rolled flat. Under Musk's model, the Hyperloop would be powered by solar panels placed on the top of the tube which would allow it to generate more energy than it needed for operation.
The Hyperloop capsules in Musk's model float above the tube's surface on a set of 28 air-bearing skis, similar to the way that the puck floats just above the table on an air hockey game. One major difference is that it is the pod, not the track, that generates the air cushion in order to keep the tube as simple and cheap as possible. Other versions of Hyperloop use magnetic levitation rather than air skis to keep the passenger pods off the tracks.
Sci-fi writers and dreamers have long envisioned ways to travel at high speeds through low-pressure tubes. Rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard in 1909 proposed a vacuum train very similar in concept to the Hyperloop. In 1972, the RAND Corp. conceived a supersonic underground railway called the Vactrain. The idea was waiting for the right combination of talent, technology, and business case to become a reality.
Problems that needed to be solved
The big problem to overcome is catastrophic tube failure. Say some extremist twit decides to blow up the tube or there is an earthquake (This could happen from any other types of accidental breach). Suddenly there will be a slug of air traveling down the tube from the breach in the tube towards a pod at pretty close to the speed of sound - a shock wave. The mass of that slug and therefore the force on the pod will vary according to the distance between the breach and the pod. However it will be on the order of 10’s of tonnes and will most likely destroy the pod, or at the very least decelerate it fast enough to splatter its occupants all over the inside of the passenger compartment. But wait, that is not the end of it. That wave will continue down the tube and most likely take out the next pod occupying the tube and so on until all pods and people in the tube are destroyed.
WHICH COMPANIES ARE WORKING ON HYPERLOOP?
Since Musk’s Hyperloop manifesto five years ago, a number of companies have sprung up in earnest to commercialize the idea.
They are:
1: Virgin Hyperloop One
2: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies
3: SpaceX
4: ET3 Global Alliance
WHERE WILL WE SEE THE FIRST HYPERLOOPS?
Both Hyperloop One and HTT are expected to announce their first hyperloop routes in 2018. Some of the first places where potential routes have been explored—or at least considerable interest has been reported—include:
• Los Angeles to San Francisco (along with the Interstate 5 corridor)
• India (various routes under consideration by both HTT and Hyperloop One)
• Germany (an 8-city route encircling the country)
• Dubai to Abu Dhabi
• Stockholm, Sweden to Helsinki, Finland
• Toronto to Montreal, Canada
• London to Edinburgh, Scotland
• Cheyenne, WY to Denver, CO to Pueblo, CO
• Vienna to Budapest
• Seoul to Busan, South Korea
• Mexico City to Guadalajara, Mexico
Stay tuned for official announcements to start happening in this year and 2019.
