Team set to compete in the Hyperloop

A team of EPFL students is one of 20 selected to take part in the Hyperloop Pod Competition this summer. The goal is to design a transport pod that can achieve the highest speed possible inside a vacuum tube - and then successfully decelerate.  One day we may be able to cross Europe in a pod travelling 1,000 kilometers per hour through a vacuum tube. In the meantime, a team of EPFL students has a more immediate challenge: they must develop a prototype pod within the next three months that will compete in the Hyperloop Pod Competition in July. The EPFLoop team has the support of the school's Senior Management and is being supervised by Professor Mario Paolone at the Distributed Electrical Systems Laboratory, with Swissmetro project coordinator Marcel Jufer serving in an advisory role. The team members introduced themselves at an event at the Rolex Forum on Thursday night. "We may be outsiders, but we can bring in a fresh perspective," says Denis Tudor, the EPFLoop team manager. The Hyperloop Pod Competition was launched in 2015 by billionaire Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX. He wants to create a new mode of transport whereby pods zip through vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 1,000 km/h. And he set up this competition - open primarily to university students - through SpaceX in order to test the technical feasibility of various aspects of his concept. The 2018 edition challenges students to come up with a design that can travel through a 1.5 km-long tube as fast as possible without crashing upon arrival. Who can do better than 323 km/h across 1.5 km?