Elon Musk is into transportation, whether it's an electric car or a spaceship. Today, he detailed a plan to revolutionize a portion of public transit. It's called the Hyperloop, and it's meant to get folks from SF to LA in 30 minutes seated in aluminum pods that are hurtled to and fro at 800 miles an hour in a pair of steel tubes. To keep things safe, pods will be spaced five miles apart so that they can stop without running into each other, which means a total of 70 pods could operate simultaneously.
Of course, the real question is how to get the pods moving at those speeds? One main issue with such transport is wind resistance (and associated friction) that increases as the speed of the pods inside the tube escalate. Naturally, one could operate the tubes in a complete vacuum, but keeping such a system free of air would be difficult to maintain over such long distances. Instead, the Hyperloop system will work as a low air pressure environment that is easily maintained, and "an electric compressor fan on the nose of the pod that actively transfers high pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel" to relieve what air does build up at the front of the pod. This compressor fan would also provide an air bearing around the pod to keep it suspended in the middle of the tube. As for power? Well, that would come from an external linear electric motors positioned every 70 miles to keep the pods humming along at subsonic speeds.
Filed under: Transportation, Science
Source: SpaceX
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