BITS Pilani is Building 1,200 Km/Hour Travel Pod For Elon Musk Contest

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A proposed Bullet train between Mumbai and Ahmedabad will take approximately two hours, running at a maximum speed of 320-350 km per hour. But what if you were told this time could be reduced to a mere 40 minutes, travelling at a unprecedented speed of 1,200 km/hour? Most people would call it a hare-brained idea.

 A group of enterprising students from BITS Pilani, though, are working on the concept. Taking a leaf from the ground-breaking "Hyperloop" travel idea of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, the students are planning to build a "pod" that will be able to reach 1,200 km/hour within a vacuum tube. 

"Hyperloop India" is in the final stage of building its single-compartment capsule or pod that will be presented and tested in late August at the Musk-owned SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, in the final round of a global contest that was initiated in 2015.

 "Hyperloop is tube travel wherein you have a vehicle that is magnetically levitated and propelled inside a vacuum tube. The technology that is used for the propulsion and braking systems can vary," Prithvi Shankar, a BE final year student at BITS Pilani and a member of what is being called Team Hyperloop, told IANS.He said that they are using a "scalability first" approach, making the design more flexible for the transportation of cargo as well as passengers.

 Hyperloop will be not only be faster than a Bullet train but also the Maglev (Magnetic Levitation) trains that touch 650 km/hour and are currently operational in Japan and China. Although both are magnetically levitated, Hyperloop will be superior to the Maglev in that it will run inside a vacuum tube, thus avoiding any air resistance, and will employ a different propulsion method. 

 The three-member team consisting of two students - Prithvi and Shibhesh -- working under Professor MS Das Gupta of BITS Pilani, is the only one from India and the second from Asia to be going to California to present their model.

 The team was formed in 2015 in response to the SpaceX design contest for which the firm built a one-mile (1.6 km) track on its premises and invited teams from all over the world to design hyperloop vehicles that could travel on the track. Competing against 216 teams -- three from India initially -- from around the world, Team Hyperloop now is among the 24 finalists.

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