Elon Musk's Hyperloop- The Faster Than Sound Transportation System

[Polish_Silver]

Musk's track record

Focused on my bond market research this summer I have not kept up with Musk's latest "No, look over here!" antics.

I thought Hyperloop was an article from The Onion when I first read it this AM, so well did it come off like a parody of a grandiose Musk scheme.

.

Although Musk had a technical major at MIT, his big financial success was paypal, hardly an engineerng tour de force.

I'd like to see him get grilled on the technical aspects of rockets, electric cars, and subways.

[aaron]

Re: Elon Musk's Hyperloop- The Faster Than Sound Transportation System

Focused on my bond market research this summer I have not kept up with Musk's latest "No, look over here!" antics.

I think that is the key. He is able to leverage small investments in vaporware and media relations to get outsized attention. It is almost like QE. It has really large effects in the beginning, but they wear off. I do not think his next save-the-world-project announcement will have much of an effect.

[cobben]

Re: Elon Musk's Hyperloop- The Faster Than Sound Transportation System

For what it's worth, here's the design info:

Musk hasn't gone all the way yet, i.e. to the tunnels through the earths crust which eliminate most of the political problems.

The Swedes were blowing people throgh tubes back in the late 1800's.

Oh, it’s easy to find. But you may want to be transported by the current of air in one of our corridor tubes? That’s also possible. Please step in.” “You’re too kind, Madam.”
“I’m just doing my job. But hurry up now, along with the other people.”
The watch-woman opened a door leading to a rather long but narrow, cylindrical room.
Apollonides entered. The room was well illuminated. He sat down in a soft armchair. All the other armchairs were occupied.
“Now, hold on!” the benevolent woman said and she rapidly drew herself back. The poet felt a peculiar vibration in his body and heard some unusual buzzing sound.
A moment later the vibration and the buzzing ceased. The door opened. They had arrived. Those, who in this way had let themselves be blown from the Tessinian wing to Svartmannagården, left the tube and found themselves once more in a vestibule where there were several watch-persons.


Tunneling


“Yes, to begin with a tunnel under the sea to Scotland. As you know, the building of tunnels has made fine progress in recent. They no longer go about it in the same silly way as in the past, when they built a tunnel through Mount Saint Gotthard, or when they tried to unite Great Britain and France by a tunnel under the English Channel. Now that we’ve succeeded in liquefying oxygen, we can permeate down to formerly inaccessible depths inside the Earth, even under the solid crust and into the floating part of the bowels of the earth.”
“But how is it possible to stand the heat down there?” one of the guests objected.
“The heat is neutralized,” the host informed, “by liquid oxygen that is fed down into the tunnel. By its rapid evaporation, the oxygen absorbs enough heat that it’s possible to stay down there without inconvenience. It has the added advantage that oxygen, when it’s turned back into a gas, by itself offers the best means of changing weather.
“And even more advantageous to the work on the tunnel is that when the liquid oxygen is piped down into the molten mass inside the earth, it congeals matter at a touch. It’s possible to squirt a pipe through the bowels of the earth. In that way, the tunnel is building itself.”
“Brilliant!” the guests exclaimed.
“More than brilliant,” a couple of engineers exclaimed. They were hoping to be employed at the new enterprise.
“Around the stream of oxygen,” the host continued, “a stiff, extraordinarily hard crust is formed. As injection proceeds, it becomes thick enough to endure the immense pressure from the Earth’s crust.”
“That’s quite obvious,” the guests agreed.
“More than obvious,” the engineers assured.
“As I was saying,” the host continued, “we begin by making a tunnel to Scotland. But later on we’ll undertake a much bigger work: we will construct a way from Europe to America under the sea , even under North America to the California coast. It will be a straight-line tunnel that would equal about 1,300 geographical miles in a geodesic line, but inside the earth it will be only the chord of the segment and extend only about 1,100 or 1,200 miles, a savings of a couple of hundred miles.
“If we think the two radii from the extreme points of the tunnel drawn towards the centre of the earth, it would comprise an angle of about 88 degrees. And thus the gradient of the line of the tunnel towards Europe as well as the American west coast would be 44 degrees inclination, meaning that the tunnel from Europe will penetrate the earth at a gradient of 44 degrees and then reach up to America at a 44-degree climb.”
“But you said only a moment ago that the tunnel would be totally straight line,” one of the guests objected.
“And it will be,” the host replied. “Gradient and climb apply only to approaching and leaving with regard to the centre of the Earth, a point that of course not will be reached. But the inclination and climb are imaginary and nevertheless perfectly sufficient to drive the carriages.
“No other power than the force of gravity is needed for that. And that is an immeasurable advantage! To begin with, the carriages rush onwards or downwards, if you wish, by their own weight. And the longer they travel, the faster they go, until they reach the focal point of the tunnel, which is the point that is closest to the centre of the Earth about 240 miles under the surface. The carriages’ speed will carry them up the rest of the way, though at at an increasngly slower pace as they approach their destination.”
“But the resisting power of the air!” an objection was heard. “How will that be overcome?”
“Simply,” the reply sounded, “by making the tunnel closed and evacuating the air with a couple of suitable ventilators.”
“And the passengers! How will they be able to breathe?”
“They will of course all be supplied with enough oxygen. It can be sold along with the tickets.”
All further objections were unnecessary. The matter was settled, clear as day. The company for the tunnel between Marstrand and the Scottish coast was immediately formed and the bank director was urged to start up the enterprise as fast as possible, so that the tunnel to California could also begin soon.
Then they drank a few glasses of seawater and went into a pleasant mood.

[charliebrown]

Re: Elon Musk's Hyperloop- The Faster Than Sound Transportation System

hmm about 5% per anum inflation rate i see :-). Of course the hedonics of color pictures and fancy fonts and all brings that rate really down to 2%. Stated CPI-U predicts the magazine should be $2.40. The cover is 3.95 today.

[c1ue]

Re: Elon Musk's Hyperloop- The Faster Than Sound Transportation System

Another masterpiece of spin:

http://www.sfgate.com/business/artic...te-4825693.php

When billionaire Elon Musk unveiled the Hyperloop in August, his critics were quick to scoff at his proposal for a new, super fast mode of transportation. A number of people derided Musk's white paper as cartoonish and vague. Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, vowed to prove the naysayers wrong by building an actual physical prototype, but that's not expected to arrive for years.

Meanwhile, some evidence has just appeared that shows Musk may indeed be onto something.

Ansys, the maker of very high-end simulation software used to design planes, trains, automobiles and all manner of other things, has fed the Hyperloop specifications into a computer and come away impressed.
"I don't immediately see any red flags," says Sandeep Sovani, the director of land transportation strategy at Ansys. "I think it is quite viable."
Musk's design called for an elevated tube to be built between two cities. Pods would be shot back and forth inside of the tube at speeds reaching up to 800 miles per hour. Air bearings placed near the underside of the pods would create a cushion to reduce friction, and the pods would be accelerated by pulses from electric motors. To cut down on resistance, Musk proposed having vacuums at the front of the pods that would suck in air, while also having the tube in a low pressure state. The end result? A 30-minute ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Ansys studied Musk's lengthy Hyperloop white paper. The company used the artists' renderings in the document to create a virtual mockup of a pod and the tube that could be fed into simulation software. It then decided to study what the air pressure might look like on the pod and inside of the tube and set a computer to work for a few hours to perform the necessary calculations.

While Sovani found the overall design to be feasible, he does think the Hyperloop will need some tweaks. For one, instead of having the pods taper at the end, he thinks they should be cylindrical with a large jet engine-type contraption at the front to suck in the air. While a soup can-shaped pod might not look as cool, it would allow for a more even distribution of air pressure across the outside of the pod and allow it to suck in more air. "In our opinion, it has to be very, very symmetrical," says Sovani.

Sovani also suggests that air bearings would do a better job of spreading air across the body of the pods. The Ansys simulation showed very uneven stress markings alongside the body of the pod.

"We see a lot of shear stress areas," Sovani says. "In something like an aircraft, the patterns would be very uniform." Bearings on the top of the pod would help the device stay balanced during slight changes in air pressure.

SpaceX uses the Ansys software, so Musk is familiar with this type of simulation technology. So too are thousands of companies that use software to design products from the ground up virtually before building physical prototypes.

Sovani plans to keep tweaking the design of the Hyperloop pods in the software and eventually to send Musk some suggestions.

So what do we have here? A company which has another Musk company as a customer, says this Musk idea could work.

Of course, the focus was entirely on the pod. No mention whatsoever on the real challenges and cost of the design - which is the infrastructure to deliver the pod, as well as passenger safety should something go wrong.

[GRG55]

Re: Elon Musk's Hyperloop- The Faster Than Sound Transportation System

In terms of sucking off the public teat, maybe.

$68 billion dollars - let's see, at $200 per round trip (airline ticket cost), it would require 340 million rides in order to just pay back the capital. The operating costs are likely non-trivial as well, not to mention safety issues. Shooting stuff out of a railgun is just not very safe - and I'll be fascinated to see what all the people who are concerned about electric power line fields will say when they realize the railgun system will subject them to EM fields millions, billions or even higher than what AC transmission wires put out.

LOL. You sound as though you are a reincarnated supporter of the UK's 1865 Locomotive Act.

"...a backlash against these large speedy vehicles (self propelled motor cars) resulted in the passage of the Locomotive Act (1865), which required self-propelled vehicles on public roads in the United Kingdom to be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag and blowing a horn. This effectively killed road auto development in the UK for most of the rest of the 19th century; inventors and engineers shifted their efforts to improvements in railway locomotives. (The law was not repealed until 1896, although the need for the red flag was removed in 1878.)..."

I'm much less convinced.

The problem in the US is lack of population density. What a lot of people don't realize is that the shinkansen system works in Japan primarily because Japan is very, very densely populated. The routes that service the population corridor thus have huge populations nearby which can make use them - a practice reinforced by the ridiculously high costs for domestic flights. Japan also has the advantage of being surrounded by ocean. This matter because very little freight in Japan goes on the rail systems - which in turn means the rails primarily just serve people.

This isn't true in the US.

Looking at Europe - only a few of the TGV lines actually even pay for their operating costs.

High speed rail lines in the US also have the last mile problem: let's say you get from SF to LA in 1 hour. Then what? You're going to walk around LA? You can get away without a car in SF, but you definitely cannot get around LA without a car. This problem is greatly reduced in the parts of Europe and Japan which are serviced by high speed rail systems.

Nonsense. High speed transport works best for high density population centers with large distances between them...not corridors with high densities along them. The latter requires numerous stops and negates any of the benefit of high speeds. The former fits massive countries like the USA and Canada perfectly.

Ground based high speed transport is an alternative to point-to-point air transport. Take the Eurostar between London and Paris. You'll find it an infinitely more civilized way to travel quickly (2 hours, 15 minutes) between those two magnificent cities than flying. And the "last mile" is a lot shorter as well. On both ends. London and Paris both have taxis. I am sure LA does too.

As for paying operating costs...the USA interstate and road system users have never covered the cost of providing that transportation system. If trucking and bus companies actually had to pay for and build their own roadways, the way a railway has to lay track, truck freight and road passenger costs would be materially higher than they are today.

[c1ue]

Re: Elon Musk's Hyperloop- The Faster Than Sound Transportation System

LOL. You sound as though you are a reincarnated supporter of the UK's 1865 Locomotive Act.

I don't see what acknowledging massive EM fields has to do with self propelled cars.

Do you know anything about EM fields? I've worked with machinery that generated fields strong enough that an iron bar cannot be pushed through them.

These levels of EM fields are not far above what is necessary to propel objects which are 3 orders of magnitude heavier in weight. I also am fascinated to see what impact said fields will have on passenger's (as well as any other nearby) electronics.

Nonsense. High speed transport works best for high density population centers with large distances between them...not corridors with high densities along them. The latter requires numerous stops and negates any of the benefit of high speeds. The former fits massive countries like the USA and Canada perfectly.

I guess it all depends on what you define as 'large distance'.

The shinkansen system in Japan - the most profitable routes which in turn subsidize most of the rest of the system - all lie between Tokyo and Osaka. That distance is 250 miles by air and 300 miles by rail.

Japan also is known for expensive domestic travel: it is not uncommon for the internal domestic connecting leg to cost more than the external international flight.

Equally in Europe - the profitable routes for TGV are Paris to Marseille (400 miles) and Paris to London (280 miles).

[Polish_Silver]

Simulation works great!

Another masterpiece of spin:

http://www.sfgate.com/business/artic...te-4825693.php



So what do we have here? A company which has another Musk company as a customer, says this Musk idea could work.

Of course, the focus was entirely on the pod. No mention whatsoever on the real challenges and cost of the design - which is the infrastructure to deliver the pod, as well as passenger safety should something go wrong.

A lot of ideas look great on a computer, but not in physical form. These guys should take a cue from Farnsworth. It took over a decade of work from the "idea" to a practical television. Countless complications had to be solved which were not anticipated at the time the patent was filed. Nothing like the hypertube exists, so the probability of success is low. The closest I know of is the pneumatic tubes used to send documents and small parts around inside factories and ships.

[DSpencer]

Re: Simulation works great!

A lot of ideas look great on a computer, but not in physical form. These guys should take a cue from Farnsworth. It took over a decade of work from the "idea" to a practical television. Countless complications had to be solved which were not anticipated at the time the patent was filed. Nothing like the hypertube exists, so the probability of success is low. The closest I know of is the pneumatic tubes used to send documents and small parts around inside factories and ships.

Exactly. The main question is not whether it's possible, but whether it's practical. It reminds me of the solar power debate: Couldn't we just power everything with solar panels? Probably, but it is not practical at all.

[vt]

Re: Elon Musk's Hyperloop- The Faster Than Sound Transportation System

As Solarcity crashes and Tesla stalls, Hyperloop starts to attempt to prove it works:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/n...sert/84236120/

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/201...-of-las-vegas/