I had no idea that this had gotten as far as building a test track.
Here’s their website: https://hyperloop-one.com/
My nephew just got a job there as an engineer. We’re all following the company very closely, but I have my doubts about any major line being set up in the US any time soon. Maybe somewhere in Europe first.
Same here. I thought it was more of a thought exercise than anything concrete, let alone moving to proof of concept already.
They just completed the test successfully:
Interesting. It was a propulsion test without the tube. I was somehow under the impression that it moved by being sucked through the tube by a vacuum, but I guess that 's not the case.
The tube will be under vacuum to eliminate as much air resistance as possible. Inside, it’s just a maglev train.
What’s the scale on this test platform? It looks small.
Regarding the vacuum; one leak in the car and it could arrive with a bunch of asphyxiated passengers and crew. I suppose it would have drop down oxygen masks like airliners do.
Comment section:
Oxygen won’t help much in a vacuum. Unless there’s also drop-down pressure suits.
But would it be a total vacuum, or even near one?
If it’s not a total/near vacuum, doesn’t that defeat the whole idea? Without a vacuum, the speeds needed/desired won’t be possible.
The Wiki article doesn’t say how much of a vacuum is planned.
ISTR that the idea is to maintain a sort of pocket of very low pressure in front of and behind the train, but not maintain vacuum along the whole tube. No, I don’t know how that was supposed to work. If the passenger compartment started to lose pressure, I would sure hope an alarm would go off and they could correct the problem.
It’s hard to see how you could maintain a pocket of vacuum just around the train. Even if you could, that pocket would have to continuously displace the air in front of it somehow, which seems like it would defeat the whole purpose of avoiding air resistance.
It seems that all this demonstrates is that they were able to build a maglev platform - something that we already know exists and works just fine. So, in that respect, this isn’t very impressive.
But, I suppose, it does demonstrate that they are able to build something and it works, so that is probably better than a large number of startups.
You would probably have two layers to your pipe. The inner layer contains the train. The outer layer is segmented, and you’re able to very quickly pump the air from the inner chamber into an outer segment, storing it until the train passed, then releasing it back into the main chamber.
You would have to be able to do this very quickly.
There’s no bubble of vacuum around the train; it’s all the same pressure.
The tube is a decent vacuum, but not a perfect one. At least in the original design, the train glides on air bearings. And the train requires a giant fan to move air from the front to the back. The fan doesn’t require tremendous power (in the way that an aircraft turbofan does), but it is necessary or else a high-pressure zone will build up in front of the train and cause drag.
Not requiring a perfect vacuum simplifies the design tremendously. There’s no need for low-outgassing materials or turbomolecular pumps or anything expensive like that. It’s about the same level of vacuum as a cheap air conditioner repair pump.
There are no cheap air conditioner repairs.
While undoubtedly this is going to come as a complete shock to everyone:
There is a unpaywalled link to the Bloomberg article in the Hacker News comments.
But there are still other companies pursuing research and development: