Students work toward creating hyperloop

Alexander Declue, a sophomore majoring in astronautical engineering, has formed a team aimed at making traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco a 35-minute trip.

Forty engineers have already joined Declue’s group, following SpaceX’s announcement of the Hyperloop Project, which will create a viable, downscaled pod to help expedite the development of this fast, inexpensive mode of transportation.

Teams are basing their vehicles off of a 58-page design that was created in 2013 by SpaceX Founder Elon Musk.  It lays out a mode of transportation, similar to a train, in which people and materials can travel to San Francisco in 35 minutes.

“A new mode of transport is needed that has benefits of the current modes [of transportation] without the negative aspects of each,” Musk said in the design.

The “pod,” set to carry 28 passengers, will travel through a low-pressure, steel tube, elevated off of the ground by concrete pylons while undergoing acceleration by linear induction motors that generate electromagnetic force.

The competition will take place in June 2016, but Declue’s group is already hard at work to achieve a pod that will operate by then.

“Once the competition was announced in June, I immediately began to reach out and start a team,” Declue said. “Throughout the summer, we began preliminary research to approach problems with Musk’s original design.”

Hyperloop is estimated to be less than one-tenth of the cost of the proposed “California High Speed Rail.”

But with this evacuated cylinder design, the USC team needs to overcome many problems in the scaled down version.

“The biggest challenge is [the cylinder] is at 1/1000 of an atmosphere,” Declue said. “There isn’t any kind of machinery to suck in enough air to levitate the craft. We’ll need off-the-shelf equipment.”

Declue also recognizes that they will have to change Musk’s original Hyperloop Alpha plan to account for problems he did not accurately address. They have already changed their own design multiple times as more information and guidelines have come out.

“The design may change substantially,” Declue said. “But the concept remains entirely similar in the spirit of Hyperloop Alpha.”

USC’s Hyperloop team recently received more details from SpaceX regarding their pusher vehicle, basically a Tesla motor and steel tube, which will be filled with concrete and covered with two aluminum sheets to create a level surface for the pod to travel on.

“We just received the information that we needed on Tuesday,” Declue said. “Now our design approach has changed.”

But the team cannot base their pod solely off of Musk’s technical paper, which has been found to have multiple errors.

“It wasn’t a very big technical paper and many things have been found wrong,” Declue said. “So we had to work full time during the summer to get to the point where we are at today.”

Now the team is focusing their efforts on researching different systems for their subgroups.

“We are designing individual subsystems that are necessary for the pod and doing trade studies on different variations,” Declue said. “The main question is how the critical components will function.”

Each Hyperloop group is integral to any success that USC will have in the competition. Time is of the essence because by Jan. 13, groups will have to submit their final design package.

“We have people working on energy storage, power electronics and conversions [and] finalizing the outer mold, pressurized air distribution, the physics of air bearings and flight software,” Declue said. “We need to exercise redundancy without taking two years to develop because the goal of the competition is to make these pods easily scaled upward for humans.”

At this point, funding has been secured through Viterbi’s Competition and Design Team Program.

“We submitted a proposal to receive funding only for the build of the vehicle — only toward parts and materials,” Declue said. “But it only covers a fraction of what we need.”

Declue and the rest of the team are looking for more students to help with the rider experience, software and structure groups.

“It’s important for USC and is the best project that has been presented so far because it is so interdisciplinary,” Declue said. “There is room for everyone to do something. We even have a whole group dedicated to the rider experience.”

The team is aiming high, but knows it is possible that its design will not succeed.

“The most likely scenario is to have a vehicle that works a little bit or crashes,” Declue said.

Their faculty advisor, professor Geoffrey Spedding, still has high hopes for his team.

“My role is to primarily represent [the team] at the Viterbi school level,” Spedding said. “But I’m also a cheerleader.”

Spedding has been astonished by these students’ organization, commitment and intelligence.

“I’m confident that they will represent themselves and us as well as can be expected. I am very impressed by people and degree of organization on this team,” Spedding said. “If we could put the right resources behind them we will get a testable design.”

Other companies independent of SpaceX and the competition are working on this project — including Hyperloop Technologies and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. USC is competing against teams that have more manpower, resources and technology.

“There are [a] number of teams with varying degrees of resources and materials,” Spedding said. “But they’ve done as well as anyone could have hoped for.”