Swissloop misses top three
The third Hyperloop Pod Competition in LA saw Swissloop compete against teams from all over the world. Due to a short-circuit, their pod didn't make it into the top three.
The third Hyperloop Pod Competition organised by SpaceX in Los Angeles ended on 22 July. Student teams from all over the world developed transport capsules or "pods" for Elon Musk's Hyperloop vision: the Tesla founder is seeking to create a transport system in which people and goods travel through vacuum tubes at over 1,000 kilometres per hour.
More than 1,000 teams applied. Eighteen of them qualified for the test week on the SpaceX site in Los Angeles – amongst them Swissloop, an association of students from ETH Zurich and other Swiss universities.
Three teams made it into the final, which saw them propel their pods through the 1.25 kilometre long vacuum tube. As in the past two years, WARR Hyperloop of TU Munich won the competition,. Their pod raced through the tunnel at a top speed of 457 kilometres per hour. The team of Delft University of Technology reached 142 km/h, that of l'Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) 90 km/h.
Swissloop missed being amongst the finalists. After their Pod “Mujinga” had passed the first tests very successfully, one of the inverters suffered a failure during a vacuum chamber test at SpaceX. This caused their high-power batteries to be short-circuited. Despite extensive efforts to fix them, the internal cells remain damaged.
Ambitious plans after the competition
Cassandra H?nggi, Swissloop's Head of Communications, says: "It goes without saying that we're disappointed not to be in the top three. But we're very grateful for the experience we had here in LA and throughout the project. We've learned a lot – something that will certainly be useful to us in the future, because our goal goes far beyond this competition."
In the long term, the students are aiming to use Hyperloop technology to revolutionise freight transport in Switzerland. Their forward-looking vision envisages deploying a form of modern pneumatic tube to transport packages a great deal faster and in a more eco-friendly way than at present. This would be achieved via a nationwide underground Hyperloop network. They presented their vision to the public for the first time in May (ETH News reported).
Swissloop
Swissloop is an association of students from ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich (UZH), the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts North-western Switzerland (FHNW). Over 50 students have contributed to the project since its inception in the autumn of 2016. Both prototypes were drafted and developed by ETH mechanical and electrical engineering and material science students. The pod's housing is a joint endeavour involving the FHNW.