Designing the next generation of transportation
Students go toe to toe with teams from around the globe in Hyperloop competition
From walking to wheels, getting from A to B has always been a challenge.
Two teams of student-engineers from the Watson School were among 124 teams representing 27 states and 20 countries that participated in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition Design Weekend at Texas A&M University in late January with new ideas about getting people around as quickly and safely as possible.
The Hyperloop, a high-speed ground transport concept, was first proposed by SpaceX and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk in 2013. With Hyperloop, passengers could travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under 30 minutes at roughly 700 miles per hour. Passengers would ride in futuristic subway cars called “Pods,” radically transforming the speed and safety of passenger mass transit.
“The experience was simply incredible,” says Tyler Mehlman, a mechanical engineering major who led Team WHIP, the Watson Hyperloop Innovation Project. “Our work was on par with schools such as Michigan, RIT and MIT, and I am proud of the work we put in.”
Kirill Zaychik from the Mechanical Engineering Department was the team’s faculty advisor.
The WHIP pod was a 13-foot aluminum tube reinforced with ribs based on airplane fuselages. It used an air ski model for travel with “landing gear” slowed by disc and electromagnetic brakes.
“Aside from technical realizations, the competition was a taste of real-world management. Organizing 11 engineers with their own schedules is no trivial challenge,” Mehlman says.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, along with Musk, spoke directly with Binghamton students about their designs and the future of travel in America.
The second Binghamton team, Team EAL, was named for aviation pioneer Edwin Albert Link. The EAL design combined air and magnetism to float the nearly tubular pod stabilized by forced air flows. An I-beam track supported the pod using horizontal wheels for braking.
“I had a lot of pride in our team. A lot of hard work was recognized by the engineering community,” says team leader Cody O’Connor. “Real-world applications are quite different from school work. The requirements were changing relative to competitor feedback, so it was important to adapt. It is important to communicate well as the project progressed.”
The MIT team beat out Binghamton to test its design on the one-mile test track adjacent to the SpaceX headquarters.
