A team of engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA has won the first stage of the SpaceX Hyperloop design competition, which was held at Texas A&M University in College Station.
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The high-speed ground transportation concept would move pods of people through a tube at speeds of about 700 miles per hour.
The Virginia Tech team, officially named Hyperloop at Virginia Tech, achieved the Pod Technical Excellence Award, while RUMDLoop moved on via the general category. “It just makes sense we would help advance what might be the future of transportation”.
The MIT team was announced the victor of the Hyperloop pod design at Texas A&M University’s Design Weekend, though Musk made a surprise appearance to get everyone excited and offer advice, Fortune noted.
The entrants were judged on a variety of criteria, including “innovation and uniqueness of design; full Hyperloop system applicability and economics; level of design detail; strength of supporting analysis and tests; feasibility for test tract competition; and quality of documentation and presentation”, Texas A&M University said on its website. The prototype pod will measure about 8.2 feet long by 3.3 feet wide and weighs in at about 550 pounds, and will come with a mechanical pusher for propulsion and different sensors. The MIT team has four sub-teams- vehicle dynamics, electronics and software, aerodynamics, and levitation.
It seems like only yesterday that the Hyperloop system was just a gleam in the eye of Elon Musk.
Delft University of Technology from the Netherlands into second place, the University of Wisconsin third, fourth Virginia Tech and the University of California, Irvine, fifth.
The winning design comes from MIT, which uses magnetic levitation instead of air bearings.
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“MIT has been involved in so many technological breakthroughs in the past century”, says MIT team captain Philippe Kirschen, a master’s student in aeronautics and astronautics. In Hyperloop, people and freight are propelled in pods through tubes maintained at a near-vacuum. The MIT Hyperloop Team as well as 22 other student engineering teams will build human-scale prototypes of their pods to test on a one-mile track outside of Space X’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The competition was organized at Texas A&M University last weekend.
