MIT student engineers won a competition to transform SpaceX and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk's idea into a design for a Hyperloop to move pods of people at high speed.Massachusetts Institute of Technology, based in Cambridge, Massachuse-tts, was named the winner Saturday after a competition among more than 1,000 college students at Texas A&M University in College Station.
The Hyperloop is a high-speed ground transport concept proposed by Musk to transport “pods” of 20 to 30 people through a 12-foot diameter tube at speeds of roughly 700mph. More than 100 university teams presented design concepts to a panel of judges in an event that began Friday.
Over the weekend, a thousand high school and college students congregated at Texas A&M University to pitch prototype design ideas for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. The winning team from MIT will build a vehicle to be tested by Musk & Co.
The winning team said the philosophy behind their design “is to demonstrate high-speed, low-drag levitation technology. We aim to build a light pod to allow us to achieve the highest cruise speed.” The design relies on a magnetic levitation system that keeps the pod 15 millimeters above the Hyperloop tube’s surface. The pod’s shell will be constructed of woven carbon fiber and polycarbonate sheets. In case of emergency, the pod design includes a braking system that will automatically activate if any system in the pod fails, and, if necessary, the pod would be able to drive itself forward or backward using physical wheels.
On the team’s website, it explains that its prototype has one major goal: “to demonstrate high speed, low drag levitation technology.” To that end, the 550-pound pod is designed to accelerate at 2.4G to a maximum speed of 250mph. The construction of the prototype pod is said to begin this month, with testing taking place from April. Elsewhere, Delft Unive-rsity of Technology from The Netherlands came second, the University of Wisconsin third, Virginia Tech fourth and the University of California, Irvine, fifth. It’s expected those teams will also build and test pods for Hyperloop, too. “We don't have any specific plans to back Hyperloop companies,” Musk said.
