Elon Musk
Hyperloop is a high speed transportation concept as proposed by Elon Musk, one of the biggest entrepreneurs of our times, founder of companies such as Paypal, Tesla or SpaceX.
Hyperloop would allow travelling from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than 30 minutes through a capsule in a tube at 1200km/h. It is fast, safe and eco-friendly thanks to its solar power supply which makes it self-sufficient.
With the objective of accelerating the development of a functional prototype of this groundbreaking means of transport and supporting university innovation, SpaceX has promoted a worldwide competition to design and build the best capsule or case prototype to travel through the tube. 318 teams from 16 countries have joined the challenge.
Competition kicks off, 13 students of the GAIA platform set up the GAIA Hyperloop Team and begin to design the first drafts of the capsule prototype.
Submission of the Preliminary Design Briefing, a presentation with the first drafts and calculations on how the prototype design will be.
Submission of the Final Design Package. At this moment, the task of designing the prototype is considered complete. It is time to prepare the presentations for the Design Weekend.
Design Weekend: 5 members of the team travel to the A&M Texas University to make a presentation on the final prototype design. The design will be assessed by the engineers of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as by Engineering professors of the participant universities.
Competition Weekend. The selected teams at the Design Weekend will test their prototypes in the 1mi. testing tube created at the California SpaceX facilities.
The GAIA Hyperloop Pod is light, fast, safe, and, as well as competing with our prototype design, we wanted to bet on three of our subsystems with which we will also compete individually: Levitation, Propulsion and Safe Navigation.
Levitation: magnetic levitation is a method that allows keeping an object floating due to the magnetic field action, allowing suspension and vehicle guidance. Through this system, higher speed in the conventional means of transport is obtained. The levitation system designed does not consume any energy nor produces any vibrations, making travelling a comfortable and unforgettable experience.
Propulsion: propulsion is the movement generated from strength. The objective of this subsystem is to reach high speed in few seconds through an economic, stable and innovative system.
Safety Navigation: we bet on reliability, quality, development, and above all, safety. Designing the Pod, all the possible error scenarios have been taken into account and we count on the most advanced technologies to detect and solve any distress.
Our team is composed of 13 students of the GAIA Program Master in Professional Development, a training program of the Fundacion Universidad-Empresa that counts on the Universidad de Alcala’s degree, supervised by a college advisor and a team leader.
After having submitted the Preliminary Design Briefing, we are currently working on the final design of the prototype that will be finished by January 20th.
After the assessment of the Preliminary Design Briefing by the Spacex team, the team is officially invited to make a presentation on its design prototype at the Design Weekend event (January 29th and 30th, Texas), the final competition, in which the real capsule prototypes functionality will be tested.
Facing a project with such an innovative responsibility requires facing a great deal of obstacles and devoting many resources both personal and material. However, the team eagerness to innovate and its motivation to take part in such big project remain unchanged.
Do you want to help us reach our goals? This is what we need:
- Materials.
- A place to develop the project.
- Travel costs to the final competition.
Helping the team solve specific doubts about electricity, motors, magnetic fields, new energy sources, materials, etc.
Advising and providing a transport to move the prototype to the final phase of the competition in California.
Get in touch and keep updated on how we are living this experience
