Hyperloop|
5 mode of transportation| All you need to know
The Hyperloop is a
proposed mode of passenger and freight transportation, first used to
describe an open-source vactrain design released by a joint team from Tesla and SpaceX.
Hyperloop is a sealed tube or system of tubes
with low air pressure through which a pod may travel substantially free
of air resistance or friction.
The Hyperloop could convey people or objects at
airline or hypersonic speeds while being very energy efficient.
This would drastically reduce travel times
versus trains as well as planes over distances of under approximately 1,500
kilometres (930 miles).
Origin
Elon Musk first publicly introduced the concept of Hyperloop in 2012.
His
initial concept incorporated reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules
ride on air bearings driven by linear induction motors and axial compressors.
The Hyperloop Alpha concept was first published
in August 2013, proposing and examining a route running from the Los Angeles region to
the San Francisco Bay Area, roughly following the Interstate 5 corridor.
The Hyperloop concept has been explicitly "open-sourced" by Musk and SpaceX, and others have been encouraged to take the ideas and further develop them and few companies have been formed, and several interdisciplinary student-led teams are working to advance the technology.
Musk first mentioned that he was thinking about a concept for a "fifth mode of transport", calling it the Hyperloop, in July 2012 at a PandoDaily event in Santa Monica, California.
The name Hyperloop was
chosen because it would go in a loop.
Musk envisions the more advanced versions will
be able to go at hypersonic speed.
In May 2013, Musk likened the Hyperloop to a
"cross between a Concorde and
a railgun and an air hockey table".
Theoretical
Concept and early Difficulties
Developments in high-speed rail have
historically been impeded by the difficulties in managing friction and air resistance, both of which
become substantial when vehicles approach high speeds.
The vactrain concept
theoretically eliminates these obstacles by employing magnetically levitating trains in evacuated (airless)
or partly evacuated tubes, allowing for speeds of thousands of miles per hour.
However, the high cost of maglev and the
difficulty of maintaining a vacuum over large distances has prevented this type
of system from ever being built.
The Hyperloop
resembles a vactrain system but operates at approximately one millibar (100 Pa) of pressure.
Hyperloop Pod
Competition
In June 2015, SpaceX announced that it would build a 1-mile-long (1.6 km) test track to be located next to SpaceX's Hawthorne facility. The track would be used to test pod designs supplied by third parties in the competition.
The MIT Hyperloop team developed the first Hyperloop pod prototype, which they unveiled at the MIT Museum on 13 May 2016. Their design uses electrodynamic suspension for levitating and eddy current braking.
On 29 January 2017, approximately one year after phase one of the Hyperloop pod competition, the MIT Hyperloop pod demonstrated the first ever low-pressure Hyperloop run in the world.
Within this first competition the Delft University team from
the Netherlands achieved the highest overall competition score, winning the
prize for "best overall design".
The award for the "fastest pod" was
won by the team WARR Hyperloop from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany.
The second Hyperloop pod competition took place from 25–27 August 2017. The only judging criteria was top speed, provided it was followed by successful deceleration.
WARR Hyperloop from the Technical University of Munich won the competition by reaching a top speed of
324 km/h (201 mph) and therefore breaking the previous record of
310 km/h for Hyperloop prototypes set by Hyperloop One on their
own test track.
A third Hyperloop pod competition took place
in July 2018. The defending champions, the WARR Hyperloop team from the Technical University of Munich, beat their own record with a top speed of 457 km/h
(284 mph) during their run.
The fourth competition in August 2019 saw the
team from the Technical University of
Munich, now known as TUM Hyperloop (by NEXT
Prototypes e.V.), again winning the competition and beating their own record
with a top speed of 463 km/h (288 mph).
Hyperloop
Companies
1.Virgin
Hyperloop one
Virgin
Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop One, and before that, Hyperloop
Technologies) was incorporated in 2014 and has built a team of
280+, including engineers, technicians, welders, and machinists.
It
has raised more than US$160 million in capital from
investors including DP World, Sherpa
Capital, Formation 8, 137 Ventures, Caspian
Venture Capital, Fast Digital, GE Ventures, and SNCF.
Hyperloop
One was founded by Shervin Pishevar and
Brogan BamBrogan, BamBrogan left the company in July 2016, along with
three of the other founding members of Arrivo.
Hyperloop
One then selected co-founder Josh Giegel, a former SpaceX engineer, to be CTO.
On 11 May 2016,
Hyperloop One conducted the first live trial of Hyperloop technology,
In July 2016,
Hyperloop One released a preliminary study that suggested a Hyperloop
connection between Helsinki and Stockholm would be feasible, reducing the travel
time between the cities to half an hour.
The construction
costs were estimated by Hyperloop One to be around €19 billion (US$21 billion at 2016 exchange rates).
On 12 May 2017,
Hyperloop One performed its first full-scale Hyperloop test, becoming the first
company in the world to test a full-scale Hyperloop.
In February
2018, Richard Branson of Virgin Hyperloop One announced that he had a
preliminary agreement with the Maharashtra State government of India to build the Mumbai-Pune Hyperloop.
In July 2019,
the Government of Maharashtra and Hyperloop One set a target to create the
first hyperloop system in the world between Pune and Mumbai.
2.Hyperloop Transportation
Technologies
Hyperloop
Transportation Technologies (HTT) is the first Hyperloop company created
(founded in 2013), with a current workforce of more than 800 engineers and
professionals located around the world.
Some
collaborate part-time; others are full-time employees and contributors. Some
members are full-time paid employees; others work in exchange for salary
and stock options.
In December
2016, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and the government of Abu Dhabi announced plans to conduct a feasibility study on a
Hyperloop link between the UAE capital and Al Ain, reducing
travel time between Abu Dhabi and Al Ain to just under 10-minutes.
In
September 2017, HTT announced and signed an agreement with the Andhra Pradesh state government of India to build a track from Amaravathi to Vijayawada in a public-private partnership, and suggested
that the more than one hour trip could be reduced to 5 minutes through the
project.
In June 2018,
Ukraine's Infrastructure Ministry reached an agreement with Hyperloop
Transportation Technologies to develop its high-speed vacuum transport
technology in Ukraine.
Later in 2018,
the company signed an agreement with the Guizhou province of China to build a
Hyperloop.
3.DGWHyperloop
Established in
2015, DGWHyperloop is a subsidiary of Dinclix GroundWorks, an engineering
company based in Indore, India.
DGWHyperloop's
initial proposals include a Hyperloop-based corridor between Delhi and Mumbai called the
Delhi Mumbai Hyperloop Corridor (DMHC).
The company
has partnered with many government agencies, private companies, and
institutions for its research on Hyperloop.
DGWHyperloop
is the only Indian company working on implementing the Hyperloop
system across the nation.
4.Hyper Poland
Hyper Poland is a Polish company founded in 2017 by engineers who
graduated from the Warsaw University of Technology.
In the summer of 2017, acting as the Hyper
Poland University Team, they built a hyperloop model which took part in the
SpaceX Pod Competition II in California.
In March 2018,
the company was recognized as one of the best startups in the mobility sector in
Europe.
Unlike other
companies in the Hyperloop sector, Hyper Poland develops a system aimed at
offering a low-cost upgrade to existing conventional railway corridors.
The system -
dubbed ‘magrail’ - is based on magnetic levitation, linear motor and autonomous
control systems and can be transformed into a full-fledged, vacuum Hyperloop at
a later stage.
Key
differentiator of Hyper Poland’s magrail technology is its interoperability
with conventional railway systems which allows for the functionality of both
the magrail system and conventional trains on the same tracks and promises
reduced infrastructure costs and faster implementation by using existing and
regulatorily approved railway corridors.
In its initial implementation stage, the
system is designed for speeds comparable to today’s conventional High-speed rail (300-415 kph), but at significantly
lower implementation costs.
The system
allows a subsequent upgrade into a vacuum system with speeds of up to 600 kph
on conventional tracks and 1,000 kph on HSR lines.
In the first
half of 2019, Hyper Poland it secured a EUR 3.8 million grant from the Polish
National Center for Research and Development and two pre-seed rounds
on a UK equity crowdfunding platform of EUR 820k total.
In October 2019, Hyper Poland presented its
‘magrail’ prototype vehicle and a track in 1:5 scale.
Note: Many another companies also in
race of making hyperloop transportation true in reality in future. E.g- TransPod, Arrivo, Hardt Global
Mobility, Zeleros. Now more companies take a step forward in this field.
Critics of Hyperloop
Some critics
of Hyperloop focus on the experience—possibly unpleasant and frightening—of
riding in a narrow, sealed, windowless capsule inside a sealed steel tunnel,
that is subjected to significant acceleration forces; high noise levels due to air
being compressed and ducted around the capsule at near-sonic speeds; and the
vibration and jostling.
Even if the
tube is initially smooth, ground may shift with seismic activity.
At high
speeds, even minor deviations from a straight path may add considerable buffeting.
This is in
addition to practical and logistical questions regarding how to best deal with
safety issues such as equipment malfunction, accidents, and emergency evacuations.
Other maglev trains are already
in use, which avoid much of the added costs of Hyperloop.
The SCMaglev in Japan has demonstrated 603 km/h
(375 mph) without a vacuum tube, by using an extremely aerodynamic train
design.
It also avoids the cost and time required to
pressurize and depressurize the exit and entry points of a Hyperloop tube.
There is also
the criticism of design technicalities in the tube system.
John Hansman,
professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, has stated problems, such as how a slight
misalignment in the tube would be compensated for and the potential interplay
between the air cushion and the low-pressure air.
He has also questioned what would happen if
the power were to go out when the pod was miles away from a city.
UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller has also expressed
concern regarding "[the Hyperloop's] novelty and the vulnerability of its
tubes, [which] would be a tempting target for terrorists", and that the
system could be disrupted by everyday dirt and grime
The solar panels Musk plans to install along the length of
the Hyperloop system have been criticized by engineering professor Roger
Goodall of Loughborough University, as not being feasible enough to return enough energy to
power the Hyperloop system, arguing that the air pumps and propulsion would
require much more power than the solar panels could generate.
Cost estimates
of the Hyperloop
A number of
economists and transportation experts have expressed the belief that the US$6 billion price tag dramatically understates the
cost of designing, developing, constructing, and testing an all-new form of
transportation.
Michael Anderson, a professor of agricultural
and resource economics at UC Berkeley, predicted that
costs would amount to around US$100 billion.
The Hyperloop white paper suggests that US$20 of each one-way passenger ticket between Los
Angeles and San Francisco would be sufficient to cover initial capital costs, based on
amortizing the cost of Hyperloop over 20 years with ridership projections of
7.4 million per year in each direction and does not include operating costs
Hyperloop on Mars
According
to Musk, Hyperloop would be useful on Mars as no tubes would be needed because
Mars' atmosphere is about 1% the density of the Earth's at sea level.
For
the Hyperloop concept to work on Earth, low-pressure tubes are required to
reduce air resistance.
However,
if they were to be built on Mars, the lower air resistance would allow a
Hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track.
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