Re: Europe and Asia moving ahead with workable hyperloop.

Dec 01, 2023 Last reply: 2 years ago 25 Replies

The 1220 km/h is about 340 m/s, thus in free fall in vacuum 34 seconds is needed to reach that speed. A vertical fall distance of 5.8 km is required. Thus the module would have to run at least 6 km below ground between stations. Not very pract8ical.

While gravity is used in local train and underground system design, the station is usually built on a hill or at least elevated from ground. Thus this helps accelerating the train leaving a station and decelerating before running into the next station. Thus some energy is saved.

If a new station is required between two original stations (e,g, new housing or other centers) building a new station is sometimes refused, because of the new station would have to be built at the lowest point of the track, requiring extra power to accelerate from the station and extra breaking power is required when arriving to the new station.

If the train can feed the braking power back to the network, the situation is not that bad.

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If you drill a straight tube between any two points on earth, and put a frictionless cart at one end, it will roll all the way to the other end for free. It takes 42 minutes.

That isn't the hyperloop concept, but rather a particular sort of long distance transport through evacuated tunnels. It as all spelled out in a Proceedings of the IEEE article some decades ago. Parabolic tunnels between any two points on the earth's surface offers a constant 42 minute transit time. Most of them get impractically deep.

John Larkin's imagination isn't a benign environment. It's best avoided. A car that's longer than the diameter of the tube couldn't tumble inside that tube in the real world, but imaginary environments offer more degrees of freedom,

That's not what the 1974 patent claims.

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A straight tube won't offer the right initial acceleration or terminal deceleration to give you 42 minutes - the patent talks about a catenary.

How about interconnected trapeze swings, or loss-free pogo sticks.

It's all downhill from here.

Rl

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