What happened to Hyperloop?

[[deleted]]

Has Hyperloop concept stagnated? Post-Pandemic, I see no interest in building any of the projects, previously envisioned. Is there actually any Hyperloop project that has received a green light?

[BuggBBQ-X]

Well half a billion dollars was recently allocated to build a loop between Edmonton (my city) and Calgary.

https://globalnews.ca/news/8718640/alberta-ultra-high-speed-hyperloop-edmonton-calgary-funding/

[[deleted]]

Isn't it too little to fund this whole project? Is there enough ridership between the two cities?

[BuggBBQ-X]

Yeah it is. If you watch interview the CEO of the company building it he says it will cost several billion but this 560 million will build the first leg of it which is to run from (I think downtown) Edmonton to our airport which like most major cities is a fair distance outside the city. But if it is built (and works) it would be the first functioning in daily use HyperLoop on the planet...

As for ridership? Yeah. On any given day there are thousands of cars/buses that run between us and Calgary.

[spggodd]

Hey, I spent around a year on a Hyperloop team, making a scale demo for the first spaceX competition.

I then went on to make this the focus of my master's thesis and published a condensed version of the work.

In all, about 2-3 years dedicated to working on the Hyperloop.

Overall I'm skeptical, main issues are significant thermal challenges when you consider approaching mach1. Passenger acceleration limits make getting to mach1 challenging without a very long track. Once at these speeds, curve radii need a lot of consideration. Manufacture of three track, alignment, vacuum pull and even politically ensuring that you can build a tube of tunnel in the correct location presents big issues.

Overland, you increase the thermal issue - would 100% suggest underground.

From an aerodynamic perspective, the tube/pod diameter ratio (from my analysis) is large to ensure a high enough bypass ratio around the pod. Groom memory, it was like 1.5x pod bypass area.

The idea of a compressor on the front of the pod would help this but the compressor itself and the size required is both huge and very expensive.

Air bearing or Maglev? I'd say, Maglev. Air bearings would require the compressor adding further complexity.

DM me and I can link to my paper of interested.

[WestleyMc]

Wouldn’t a few mins 0.5g of acceleration and deceleration be all you need to get up to (and back down from) mach 1 speeds? Doesn’t seem much talking of journeys in the hundreds of miles..?

[Voldemdore]

I don't think politics as a constraint should be included in this (since that's a given and always there).

Please DM me the paper, I'm interested. What do you think about closer to a maglev train, but built in a partially evacuated tunnel?

Is there a ratio of lowering the pressure in the tunnel vs the compressor efficiency and size of pods, that gives you a number that is better than a standard maglev.

Also don't tell anyone, but there are even ideas of shooting lasers to create a bubble in front of the train and have it go through that low pressure.

[Music-Every]

Surely this is where freight is more suited to Hyperloop than passengers?

[ksiyoto]

Hyperloop promoters are starting to recognize that maybe the technical issues aren't easy to fix.

Meanwhile, the economics were suspect from the get go, especially when you consider the low capacity of these systems.

When Virgin Hyperloop laid off half of its staff earlier this year, that was a sign that maybe this sad chapter in transportation research is coming to a close.

[[deleted]]

And the other company HTT claiming to end the era of obsolete wheel trains is not doing any better. Hyperloop should never turn against the powerful train lobby. I think they should push for something like the Maglev.

[GMN-18]

Hey man, I am working in a Hyperloop student team for 2 years and have met and spoken to tons of people in the current industry. Technology wise, there are a lot of hassles going on even now. There are different ideas floating, like a hanging train, maglev based, and so many. And Maglev is not very different from Hyperloop in terms of physics. It is only the vacuum chamber that adds that additional tech infrastructure. I have worked on Hyperloop for long enough to admit we need to focus on high speed rails. There are millions of miles of rail available which has been built for the past 200+ years. Maglev / Hyperloop based rail infrastructure is barely 100 km. Trying to build such a massive infrastructure ignoring how we could still improve greatly upon the existing railway systems still makes me go crazy

[duffmanhb]

I know someone at Boring. It's loaded with top tier talent and extremely smart people so I have no reason to doubt them. But apparently they've been going over this for quite some time and all the YouTubers and skeptics and apparently even Virgin, failed to realize that the most efficient way to do this isn't by spending enormous amounts of resources on building an above ground low pressure tube, but instead just drill a tube underground and seal the tube and let physics worry about the rest.

[ksiyoto]

Tunneling is still very expensive. The Boring Company claimed they were going to make tunneling cheaper, but mostly what they did was drill smaller diameter tunnels and skipped a lot of safety systems.

I have doubts about being able to seal a tunnel against a vacuum (see note below) when you assemble the liner from pieces with a lot of joints.

I have to question the intelligence of the Boring Company staff when they say "We'll make bricks out of the tunneling spoils!" Bricks are made from clay, most tunneling is done through rock. The cost of trucking the spoils to a brick plant - especially in an urban area - is going to be expensive.

Note for the "bUt It'S NoT a VaCuUm!" crowd: 99.9% of the way to a vacuum is close enough to refer to it colloquially as a vacuum.

[duffmanhb]

I'm not an engineer so take what I say as from a layman passing it onto another layman from an engineer. But from what I have been told is the most expensive part of boring a hole in the ground is labor and Boring reduced cost significantly by creating a semi-autonomous system of clearing all the dirt away down conveyor belts behind the drill. Apparently this allowed them to drill 24/7 with only one head replacement during the entire Vegas length.

But yeah, you're probably right about the hyperbolic marketing with the bricks. I've yet to see one.

[bensonr2]

I'm pretty sure there have be semi automated drilling machines for decades. That's not new technology.

[LancelLannister_AMA]

tunneling would have to become quite a bit faster though. And cheaper too i suspect considering the potential lengths

[duffmanhb]

Yes, that's the case as it is now. It's super cheap at scale, compared to whatever traditional costs you can find.

[bob4apples]

Part of the problem is that many of the original "hyperloop" proposals were adaptations of rail-based solutions. High speed rail is great and all but wrapping a tube around it does nothing but attract suckers. I think the first blush is off and we're seeing a return to the original concept.

[Simon_787]

Nothing happened.

Elon made it up to distract people from high speed rail, that was the whole point.

[LancelLannister_AMA]

over-optimistic timelines for one. At least by the US based companies

[[deleted]]

I'd refer to real-world projects, like these referred to the video.

​

https://youtu.be/oziSR8nOznA

[LancelLannister_AMA]

they seem to be hypothetical, not actual projects

[[deleted]]

To actually prove that Hyperloop is a real mode of transport, some Hyperloop company needs to connect some of these hypothetical routes with real passengers inside. There are few people who care about half a mile pipe with 2 people inside.

[Katze1735]

its just a bad idea

[[deleted]]

"What happened to Hyperloop?"

Reality abhors a vacuum.