On a Sunday night 15 minutes before midnight in early November, a group of undergraduate engineers is still wide awake. They’re stationed at TechPad, a local coworking space, trying to figure out how to not catch their Hyperloop pod on fire.
“So, could we find a more efficient way in a triangle configuration?” asks Bobby Smyth, a senior from Yorktown, Virginia, studying mechanical engineering, who’s trying to figure out the best way to arrange an array of batteries inside a pressure vessel.
“Oh, you’re saying if we did a cylindrical pressure vessel?” asks Eric Plevy, a senior from Durham, North Carolina, studying aerospace engineering and aerospace and propulsion lead for the Hyperloop at Virginia Tech team.
“Yeah,” says Smyth, the chief engineer. “This is really driven by fitting inside the skin.”
They go back and forth, trying to create a pressure vessel that not only works, but can be contained in the carbon fiber shell housing the complex systems inside the Hyperloop pod they’re building from scratch.
This is but one in a series of problems they have to solve — problems that have no definite answer in a textbook — in their quest to create a pod that can race through a vacuum chamber at speeds upward of 200 miles per hour.
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