Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
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Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
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Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
#2I could see investors wanting to fund this simply for the PR benefits; whether or not such a system is actually viable.
Or, perhaps they'll spin a few technologies out of it.
Or, perhaps they want to grow a network of related companies+technologies that they can re-purpose to another venture in the future.
Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
#3When are we going to address the elephants in the room?
Just the tube alone:
- largest pressure vessel in the world. How do you keep it at near vacuum?
- Thermal expansion over such a large distance, especially if the top of the tube is warmer than the bottom.
- Safety, how does an evacuation look like if the tubes are sealed?.
Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
#4Hope it fares better than Virgin Galactic which is at least eight years behind schedule (first commercial flights proposed for 2010).
Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
#5When are we going to address the elephants in the room? Just the tube alone: - largest pressure vessel in the world. How do you keep it at near vacuum? - Thermal expansion over such a large distance, especially if the top of the tube is warmer than the bottom. - Safety, how does an evacuation look like if the tubes are sealed?. There are many more. Some how I feel like this is a "pipe" dream. Lots of marketing, very…
The pressure tube doesn't need to be at near-vacuum. By the drag equation, air resistance is proportional to pressure; merely cutting pressure by 90% would reduce air resistance by the same amount, and that's trivial with perfectly ordinary pumps.
Serious vacuum pumps are not required. This is not to say that keeping it airtight won't still be a major engineering problem, it just isn't as near-impossible as near-vacuum would be.
To cope with expansion, you'd need to use sliding plates--which, yes, will make it harder to keep the air out. That's going to be an interesting challenge.
Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
#6When are we going to address the elephants in the room? Just the tube alone: - largest pressure vessel in the world. How do you keep it at near vacuum? - Thermal expansion over such a large distance, especially if the top of the tube is warmer than the bottom. - Safety, how does an evacuation look like if the tubes are sealed?. There are many more. Some how I feel like this is a "pipe" dream. Lots of marketing, very…
The CERN LHC tube is a 27km circle of vacuum and near-zero temperature, and they don't seem to have a problem with that (granted, they had some but it's solved now).
Frankly, yes, there may be issues, but I'm confident that the Human race will be able to overcome those.
Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
#7Despite the fact there are more billionaires than ever, it's funny how small the group of bold innovators are. It always seems to be the same few people.
Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
#8Something I wrote a while ago.... w/ back of the napkin calculations.......
Why I wouldn’t invest a money into Hyperloop
- Stabilizing a single fault line risk pylon is more than $250K.
- How many million are needed for vacuum pumps to evacuate 100+ million cubic feet of of pipe to 100 Pa?
- Hot air discharge needs to go somewhere. For every 1 bar pressure, you need ~200 to ~400 cubic meters of volume which is larger
- This seems very much like one of those Andy Grove Fallacies.
- The hyperloop is a mega engineering project on the ground. Nobody on their team is a civil engineer. Looking at their team objectively, there seems to be a mismatch of competency.
- At its core, the science i good, the cost-economics do not work. Das ist nicht gute.
Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
#9When are we going to address the elephants in the room? Just the tube alone: - largest pressure vessel in the world. How do you keep it at near vacuum? - Thermal expansion over such a large distance, especially if the top of the tube is warmer than the bottom. - Safety, how does an evacuation look like if the tubes are sealed?. There are many more. Some how I feel like this is a "pipe" dream. Lots of marketing, very…
The CERN LHC tube is a 27km circle of vacuum and near-zero temperature, and they don't seem to have a problem with that (granted, they had some but it's solved now). Frankly, yes, there may be issues, but I'm confident that the Human race will be able to overcome those.
The LHC's vacuum pipes are 6.3 cm in diameter..
Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
#10All of the Hyperloop development efforts are ignoring the elephant in the room: thermal expansion. If you do the math, the ends of a viable hyperloop track will have to move hundreds of meters [1]. No one has yet advanced even a viable idea for how to deal with that, let alone an actual design. Until that happens, the Hyperloop is vaporware.
[1] It's a trivial calculation. The thermal expansion coefficient of steel is about 10^-5. A typical run of, say, SF->LA is 600 km. Temperatures in the central valley range over about 100 degrees. Multiply everything together and the result is 600 meters.