UC Irvine team prepares for the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. The UCI students found out about the competition about two years ago. They started working on their designs, hoping to develop a prototype for a ground transportation system traveling at high-speed. After they managed to surpass the performance of other teams during project submissions but also during the Design Week in 2016, they will display their project tomorrow, on January 29, at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne.
- SpaceX developed the Hyperloop Pod Competition hoping to witness the development of a high-speed ground transport system.
- The UCI team managed to surpass the performance of more than a hundred teams during the Design Week in 2016.
- This weekend, the UCI team will present their HyperXite at Weekend I contest.
This represents Week I of the project. The idea of a Hyperloop pod was first introduced back in 2013 by Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Hyperloop represents a concept for a ground transport system at high-speed. The contest was announced by SpaceX back in June 2015. We know that SpaceX creates, manufactures and launches its own spacecraft and rockets.
The space agency invited university students but also independent engineering teams to enter the competition by developing a functional scale model Hyperloop pod. According to the information the company posted on their website, they hope that the teams which entered the contest will build up a prototype for a less expensive, safer, more suitable and faster way of transportation.
The UCI team is qualified to present their project on Sunday, January 29, after their revolutionary project got them on the fifth place in the Design Weekend contest in January 2016 at Texas A&M University. During that weekend, students have presented the designs for their HyperXite pod. The craft was developed to float on a thin layer of air and to inhibit using electromagnets.
Their project was better than a hundred other projects presented during the Design Weekend. It managed to surpass the designs of the teams from UC San Diego for their TritonLoop and even the design for the Hyperloop built by the UCLA. During the competition Weekend I, about 30 teams will test their Hyperloop pods on a track which was specially developed last year for this contest.
Based on the data provided by Mackenzie Puig-Hall, the project manager of the HyperXite team, the pod designed by the Anteaters is bound to run up to 230 mph. The HyperXite device that the team presented at the contest is nearly 14 feet long, and it measures 4 feet in width. This represents a device at half the scale the pod was initially imagined, being able to fit 28 passengers.
Image courtesy of: wikipedia
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