In 2015 Musk announced a year-long competition to design vehicles for his Hyperloop scheme, a transit system to link major cities separated by 900 miles or less, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. In Hyperloop, people and freight are propelled in pods through tubes maintained at a near-vacuum. In the absence of air or surface friction, the pods travel at close to the speed of sound using low-energy propulsion systems.
According to the competition brief, the pods must accommodate a mechanical pusher that will serve as a propulsion system, and may levitate inside a near-vacuum tube that encloses the track. The capsules must also be equipped with sensors that can broadcast real-time telemetry data during the mile-long test run.
The MIT Hyperloop Team focused on speed, braking, stability, and levitation. For the latter problem, it developed a model for electrodynamic suspension that relies on powerful magnets placed over a conducting plate, which in this case is the aluminium track SpaceX is building. The magnets generate lift.
Team captain, Philippe Kirschen, a master’s student in aeronautics and astronautics, said: “The beauty of the system we designed is that it’s completely passive, an elegant property that will make our pod very scalable.”
This innovation, a departure from Musk’s original notion of pods levitating on a cushion of air, required major research . “None of us knew anything about magnets, and there has definitely been a steep learning curve for us,” Kirschen explained.
The group will now build a small-scale aluminium and carbon-fibre prototype of their design and test it this summer on a track being built next to the SpaceX headquarters in California.
“Ideally, it will reach a speed in excess of 100m/s,” Kirschen said. There will be no passengers on board for the 20s inaugural run.
