IIT Madras Students May Present Their Winning Hyperloop Pod Design To Elon Musk Himself

A group of students from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras recently unveiled their design for a Hyperloop Pod.

Avishkar Hyperloop, as they're called are now part of an elite group of teams from around the world working on Elon Musk's dream.

Images courtesy: IIT Madras/Facebook

For those of you unaware, Hyperloop is a company set up by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. It's basically a high-speed train concept using pods set up in near-vacuum tubes. Of course, this is just a concept right now, though various other groups have been testing their own designs for it.

Avishkar however is participating in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition 2019. They, alongside more than 1,600 teams from around the world, are attempting to build the most-suitable designs for Hyperloop's transport system. They're also now one of only 21 teams to make it to the final round, and the only Asian team left.

Hyperloop requires pods to be self-propelled, with reduced air resistance from the vacuum tube letting them reach more than 1000 km/h. The final demonstration will take place at the SpaceX Headquarters in California. The fastest (and safest) pod will win the competition.

"The primary factor to decide the winner is the top speed achieved by the Hyperloop Pod in the run in the 1-mile long vacuum tube, installed at the SpaceX headquarters," said Suyash Singh, the team head of Avishkar Hyperloop. "But to qualify to the top few teams to be allowed to run through the tube, the design has to go through a lot of checks and scrutiny based on its feasibility, manufacturing possibility and its safety aspects."

Avishkar's pod is about 3 metres long, and weighs about 120 kg. It uses BLDC electric motors for propulsion and a drive wheel. And though they're going with that system for the competition, they're also currently looking into how to implement magnetic levitation propulsion. They expect a lot of other teams to have that kind of design for the competition, so they want to develop and test their own system after in order to compare its performance to those designs.

In fact, there's already been talk of Hyperloop One setting up a track right here in India, along the Mumbai Pune stretch. Right now, it takes about 3 hours to make the drive between the two locations, at an average speed of about 54 km/h. That's thanks to tolls and traffic.

With Hyperloop however, assuming an average speed of about 1000 km/h, you'd make the same trip in just about 10 minutes. Heck, it might take you longer to get a seat in a pod than the actual journey takes.

If made cheap enough, the likes of Hyperloop could actually make living in one city and working in another a possibility. You could finish up working overtime at your office in Mumbai and still make it home to Pune in time to sit down for dinner with your family. That's the power of Hyperloop.