If you thought it was impossible to travel from Toronto to Montreal in 30 minutes, a group of engineering students wants to prove you wrong.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced last year it would challenge student and independent engineering teams to design a “pod” for his conceptualized Hyperloop, a high-speed transit system that has the potential to break speeds of over 1,000 kilometres per hour and revolutionize ground-level travel.
Waterloop, a group of University of Waterloo (U of W) students, is one of those teams.
SpaceX started a competition last year asking engineers to build a prototype vehicle or pod, designed to carry passengers at high speeds inside a tube powered by air pressure. The competition pitted more than 1,200 teams against each other. After two elimination rounds, Waterloop will compete in the final round against 31 remaining teams.
Waterloop will test their completed pod on a one-mile track in California this August.
Darian Zigante, the engineering team lead for Waterloop, said designing a pod has been a “pretty insane project.”
“We’re just about 40 students . . . mixed between engineering and non-engineering, working on trying to design and build a high-speed flying train,” Zigante said.
Waterloop’s prototype pod is 12 feet long, will likely weigh around 1,000 pounds, and runs at 350 kilometres per hour, according to Zigante. The design isn’t finalized, but the team will be testing it over the next two months to move the project to the final stage.
“As engineering students, we love the challenge. It’s definitely something within humanity’s grasp to build. It’s ultimately going to come down to cost and dedication of the people involved,” he said.
Zigante said Waterloop was formed in June 2015 when SpaceX first announced the competition. The team got to work on a design proposal, which they pitched as part of the competition in December. Waterloop expects the final cost of the pod to total $37,000.
“That’s the price point that we’re hoping to stay under,” Zigante said. “Some money has come from the school, but we’re looking to get a majority of it from industry sponsors and companies.”
SpaceX, which was founded in 2002 by Musk—who also co-founded PayPal and electric car company Tesla Motors—develops next-generation aerospace technologies. The company doesn’t intend to build the Hyperloop, but instead accelerate development of a functional prototype, which another company could use.
American company Hyperloop Technologies Inc. was founded last year to explore the idea and has land in Nevada for a test track to be built. The company’s top competitor is Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which crowdsources for funding.
Teams at several Canadian universities expressed interest in SpaceX’s contest. A Ryerson University team is designing a wheel system that would attach to the Hyperloop pod as part of the competition.
Carleton University students also entered the Hyperloop competition in 2015. Colin Mackenzie, team manager of the Carleton Hyperloop Team, said his team had published a presentation outlining their design intentions but had difficulty securing sponsors and funding. As a result, he said he made the decision in December not to pursue the competition.
“The team had many wild and wonderful ideas of how to proceed in bringing a Carleton entry to California,” Mackenzie said. “I felt the momentum gathering. We had great talent on our team.”
What sets Waterloop’s design apart from other teams, Zigante said, is the team intimately understands the math and physics of their prototype.
“It wasn’t a design based on looks, it wasn’t a design based on a lot of guessing. We had done a lot of the thermal calculations and got very good estimates on what factors we needed to keep tight control on,” he said. “That was something we learned a lot of other teams did not do.”
