UCI team’s design for 700 mph pod advances in SpaceX competition

UC Irvine’s HyperXite team, which is working to develop a pod that would speed travelers through an above-ground tube at more than 700 mph, finished fifth in the design phase of the international SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition and will move on in the contest.

More than 1,000 students on about 120 teams from 20 countries competed in the Design Weekend on Jan. 29-30 at Texas A&M University, vying for the chance to build and test their prototypes on the world’s first hyperloop test track this summer near the Hawthorne headquarters of SpaceX, a rocket and spacecraft design company founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Musk, also the founder of Tesla Motors, introduced the hyperloop concept in 2013 as an effort to develop a high-speed, long-distance ground transport system that is faster, safer, less expensive, more immune to weather and more sustainable and self-powering than airplanes, cars or trains.

The Hyperloop Pod Competition, which was announced in June, aims to speed up the development of a prototype by inviting university students and independent engineering teams to design and build functional scale models.

UCI’s HyperXite team plans to build a 64-foot-long pod that could carry 28 people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about 30 minutes.

“As a broader objective we want to revolutionize the way transportation works,” team member Jonathan Gieg, a business information management student, said before Design Weekend. “We can take planes, trains and cars to travel, but all those options take hours to complete the trip and they’re becoming more and more expensive.”

The team’s 23 undergraduate students, whose majors include engineering, business and computer science, were represented in Texas by 13 team members and one professor.

Hyperloop proposals call for the pod to be suspended in air to reduce friction and increase speed, but groups are split over whether to achieve that by using a stream of air underneath or pulsating the pod between magnets. HyperXite chose to levitate the pod by compressed air.

The key technologies Musk proposed for the hyperloop, including solar power and air compression, haven’t been mixed in such a complex machine before, forcing entrants to think creatively.

“In other senior design projects and annual competitions, you can look at last year and say, ‘What can we do better?’ ” said Anthony Cirillo, the UCI team’s project operations manager. “We didn’t have that here. You can’t just go on the Internet and find the answers.”

On the second day of the design competition, four UCI team members made a formal presentation to a panel of judges from SpaceX and academia, presenting a full pod design and its levitation subsystem. The presenters were chief engineer Patricio Guerrero, project manager Jacob Gantz, structures lead Juliana Andrews and head of levitation James Harvey.

Roger Rangel, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, sat in on the presentation.

HyperXite ended up one of 30 teams moving forward to the build and test round of the competition and as the highest-placing team from California on Design Weekend.

HyperXite’s pod is designed to accelerate from 0 to 219 mph in five seconds. It would float on a thin film of air using a levitation system that Harvey developed. It is the only team in the top five designs using compressed-air levitation. The others, including MIT, which placed first, use magnetic suspension.

HyperXite’s primary braking system would use electromagnets to stop the pod without making contact with the rail.

The teams next will begin construction of their model pods for testing on the SpaceX 1-mile track.

Two Los Angeles start-up companies already are developing hyperloops, starting with test-track construction in the Central Valley and North Las Vegas later this year.

But the SpaceX competition has led hundreds of companies, organizations and parents to contribute to hyperloop research.

The HyperXite team estimates the cost to build and experiment with its pod at $60,000. While in Texas, the group gained a sponsor, Irvine-based Elite Aviation Products, but still needs to raise about $40,000 to complete the pod in time for the summer testing competition.

The UCI team members have been working 40 to 50 hours a week on the project and have received $10,000, plus lab and office space from the university, free training from software companies such as Ansys and guidance from employees at corporations including Microsoft.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Andrews said in a report by UC Irvine. “We had a solid design going into the competition, and now we are optimizing for performance and manufacturing.”

The team also is looking for more students to join the effort. For more information about sponsoring or joining the team, email ucihyperxite@gmail.com.

Chan and Vardon are Times Community News staff members. Dave writes for the Los Angeles Times.