The Badgerloop will be tested later this month.
This month, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is running a competition to test hyperloop pods designed and built by university students and independent engineering teams. A team of UW-Madison students will be there.
The company is constructing a test track near its Hawthorne, California, headquarters for the competition.
The hyperloop, a tube over- or underground that is similar but larger than the pneumatic tubes used by banks and pharmacies, would allow for super-fast travel between cities that are less than 900 miles apart.
In an earlier design phase, a prototype built by the team of undergraduates at UW-Madison, dubbed Badgerloop, placed third in a field of 125, behind graduate-student-driven teams from MIT and Delft. The manufactured pod, which is expected to reach 200 mph over a one-mile run, was unveiled on Dec. 6 at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, in a ceremony complete with red lighting, music and speeches; students explained their part of the project in a variety of stations around the hall. A full-scale pod is projected to travel 760 mph.
More than 150 students from numerous disciplines participated in 18 sub-groups, working on issues related to electrical systems, braking, structure, control, industry relations, finance and marketing. None of the work was done in the classroom for credit. David Van Veen, who just graduated in electrical engineering, has served as the president of Badgerloop. The students, he says, are participating in creating a brand-new technology, a futuristic mode of transportation that could make travel much faster and more eco-friendly — if testing shows that it’s possible to do it with renewable energy. Currently, the pod is fueled by electricity.
“Being a part of a project like this, we learned a lot about engineering, building a big team, things you can’t learn in a classroom,” Van Veen says. “Also, working on a project that can shape things in the world has helped us think about what we want to do, what problems we want to solve, what impact we want to have in the world. There are a lot of big problems facing the world today, and climate change is one of them, so we all were empowered through the project to feel that we can...help in solving this problem.”
Duncan Carlsmith, a UW-Madison physics professor, advised the team throughout the project. “It has had a profound impact on the students, and is an inspiration for students here and throughout the world,” he says. “They have grown up considerably. Many will soon be leading research divisions at major companies, I am sure.”
Besides providing technical help, Carlsmith suggested that the team explore licensing its technologies with WARF and convinced his department to offer the students space to construct the pod. The Physics Department Board of Visitors supplied some management and technical guidance, which enabled the team to organize, anticipate turnover and transition through the graduation of the project’s originators. The board also assisted in looking for vendors and external supporters and ultimately contributed financially to the pod construction.
Kyle Grieger, a computer science and engineering senior, said at the pod’s Dec. 6 unveiling that the experience has been “extremely arduous. You need to have a high threshold of tolerance for not knowing.” He has a job waiting for him at a software company in San Francisco but hopes to find his way back to transportation, having realized that important improvements can be made in the field.
“I choose to believe undergraduate students can do most anything, if just allowed to succeed,” says Carlsmith. “This team bears that premise out.”
