I worked as a semiconductor equipment technician on various vacuum systems in the first half of my career, and I really can’t understand how they’ll overcome the vacuum problem. How did trying to achieve 99.9% vacuum in a tube large enough to move 28 people in a “pod” even make it past a “back of the envelope” calculations, especially when the length of the tube is taken into consideration. It seems to me the energy required to achieve and maintain vacuum and cycle vacuum to atmosphere in load locks in such a system would be enormous.
It made it past the 'back of an envelope' because it was Elon Musk's envelope, and there are far too many people in the world who are some combination of ignorant, arrogant, and greedy. I don't mean to sound harsh; I'm sure you were aware when you asked your question rhetorically. But since you asked it in public, I feel it needs to be answered, as often as possible.
Agreed, there's just no way to do this and make it a viable system. Pumping a vacuum that size will take forever, and once you have it you will need so many pumps to keep it up that you're basically spending all your money on pumps and the energy to run them. Then what happens where there's a hole in this tube? Anyone who's seen a catastrophic implosion of a large tank under vacuum will know how bad it will be. I could not want to be anywhere near that.
@@jimmygeeraets9039 RoFL omfg!!!! Thank you for the laugh. I would love to see this put into practice. Now we are not just maintaining one gigantic vacuum we have an intermittent one that follows a pod moving 1000km/h around. The time to pump down individual legs of the tube would increase massively. Maintaining a vacuum is one thing pumping a tube from atmosphere down to close to zero is another. The amount of cost and energy required to do this on a on ongoing basis would be unworkable.
As a nuclear engineer, while I generally find myself imperceptibly nodding my head in agreement to most engineering-related topics you discuss in your channel, this is probably the first time I have my reservations. The problems of maintaining a vacuum in a system with such a large surface-to-volume ratio (which increases the chance for leakages) and with such a large overall volume (orders of magnitude larger than any vacuum system every built by mankind) are very, very, very challenging. How to build such a long, intricate, air-tight system with thousands of thermal expansion joints while having so many entry and exit points? How many pumps per km to maintain the vacuum? How much power consumption? While you mentioned some of these and more issues in the video, I think you did not stress their gravity sufficiently, if at all. Now, indeed, there might be no inherent "physical" limitations to the Hyperloop concept as there might be in fusion (e.g. those magical structural materials, that will probably never exist, that can withstand irradiation by 14 MeV neutrons for more than a year before embrittling to utter failure, just to name one of a trillion issues), but that does not mean that the Hyperloop has the potential to result in an engineeringly-viable project (let alone an economically-viable one). Nonetheless, keep up your exploratory, explanatory and educational work and videos, they are always welcome! Cheers from Serbia.
Not only do the many technological obstacles need to be overcome, it has to be done while keeping the entire tube laser beam straight. The train will be full of human beings don't forget and propelling human beings down an enclosed tube at 700 mph is a perfect recipe for a train full of vomit. There's a reason Elon Musk made the idea open source. He's a dreamer, but he's no dummy and he wasn't about to put any of his own money into it.
yes, I don't think Hyperloop will ever be a reallity. I mean I can't be 100% sure when it comes to centuries or millenia into the future but: You have a lot of very big problems that make it look like other forms of transportation are simply easier and cheaper no matter what we invent in the future. The long vacuum tubes in themselves are impossible with current tecnology. The heat expansion, Heat transfer and condensation problems, losses etc. In addition for most "train" connections these super high speeds aren't achievable anyway because you can't accelerate the people inside at 20g. IF it ever becomes a reallity, it would need to be over really long distances like New York - Paris or longer, it would need to be at least similarely safe as Airplane travel and I reaaaaally don't think they will EVER get there, and it must compete against just going higher in the atmosphere. Nobody hinders us from putting additional rocket boosters to an airplane, let the normal engines take them to mach 0.8 and 15km of height, than let the rocket engines take over and take the Airplane to 50-100km of height (yay, suborbital space flight...) and like mach 7 or something. It's not much "longer" a way because on those large distances, going 50km up and down doesn't add to much extra "way" to be covered, it has the same problems with protecting against vacuum but doesn't have the problems that the vehicle compresses the air in the tube that much, so less efective air pressure at the same nominal air pressure, doesn't need expensive and currently impossible infrastructure along the whole way, in most accident scenarios it can be safed by just gliding it down to the ground while in such a tube most accident scenarios lead to a rapid decompression of the tube and unavoidable 100% fatality for all trains in the tube, airplanes are much less vulnerable to terrorists (ever shot a hyperloop tube with a gun? with the current designs it doesn't even need to be a strong gun but if they thicken the steel, well, an Anzio 50mm is free to buy in the US afaik). Even something like the starship from SpaceX is much more realistic for point to point travel on earth than a hyperloop and even this is technology that is at least a few decades from being viable and at least like half a century from being profitable. Hyperloop sounds good at first glance but it really isn't
I work with electron microscopes. We struggle to keep a 1 mm diameter, 2 meter tube at >95% vacuum. You can do it (and exceed it), obviously, but it ain't free and it always has problems.
Just the amount of money the vacuum pumps will consume in energy will be difficult to justify, which will need to come from tickets. Maybe it will be cheaper to have supersonic planes flying at 90km above ground.
As *Adam Something* on youtube pointed out about the hyperloop. Even if we overcame the technical challenges. There is very little reason to build one atm from infrastructure and a logistics perspective. As in almost all cases, pure speed isn't itself what makes a transportation system great, it's the volume it can transport every hour/day/week/month etc. And even the most optimistic estimate on the hyperloop concept has lower volume capacity then rail trains and subway systems like in London. ofc you might be able to fins a market where speed is much more important, I can imagin that ultra premium system that would almost replace private jets might be viable, but that isn't mass transportation like the London metro.
The thing with privet jets is: sure, they use the same airports as regular jets, but you don't need to have infrastructure on the ground on the scale of streets or rails. The one use i can see is for industry in bum-f-nowhere... IF the hyperloop becomes viable at one point then nobody would care that much if heavy industries make use of it. I wouldn't bet on it, not even at rate of 1 : 10, but who knows what future tech makes possible.
well subway systems generally only have a short trips (2-3 min between stops), so supersonic speed wouldn't be usefull (especially cause it takes a while to accelerate), same goes for regional trains. The only use case I see for super/hypersonic trains is ultra long distance pasanger transportation over land, such as going from capetown to cairo or Madrid to Moskau with only a couple stops in between. Where even regular maglev trains would take a while to get you where your going, but there also isnt a ocian in the way.
Yes after watching Adam something's video a while ago i was surprised Sabine wasn't as critical. Maybe this is the difference between being a physicist and being an engineer. You need an engineer sometimes to explain how your idea isn't as wonderful as you thought it was
@@dessertstorm7476 more like science communicator vs. reactionary clickbate generator. Actually looking at real proposals that are being developed vs. hyperfocusing on Elon Musk to farm content for edgy teens.
A system like the hyper loop (more precisely magnetic levitation trains in tunnels with partial vacuum) has been studied in Switzerland since 1974. The aim of the project 'Swissmetro' was to connect the main Swiss cities, which are about 100 km apart, by 15 min. connections (the trains would run at 600 km/h max. speed). It turned out that the costs are not really worth it and that a fast city-to-city connection is worthless without a integrated transportation system. What good is a 600 km/h train if you need 45 min. for the last 10 km of your trip by bus? Today the system is optimized for a 1h city to city connections every 30 min. So no matter where you are in a major Swiss city, you know that at the full hour and at the half hour you will have a fast connection to any other major city. And from there all the local transport is synchronized too. You walk off the train and onto the bus, which will then depart in a few minutes. This has made time tables basically obsolete. The challenge of Swiss public transportation today is not speed but capacity. It is planed to have the integrated city-to-city connections every 15 min.
"What good is a 600 km/h train if you need 45 min. for the last 10 km of your trip by bus?" That makes a lot of sense! I guess then that such high speed transport would be a lot more useful in much longer distances (such as the US or China). But then you face the issue of cost to build and maintain thousands of kms of infrastructure, something that at least for the hyperloop concept would be impossible.
@@newagain9964 Good public rail, tram networks (probably the best inner and inter-city transport option, period), bus schedules that coincide with other modes of transportation, even a monorail in severely congested cities where tunneling isn't an option and where layout replanning has been made unfeasible (cough, LA), and most certainly looking into other modes of transport that could move large volumes of people. (Even airships are infinitely better than these hypothetical 'ultra-fast' solutions) Capacity, reliability, and safety are paramount. Trams, Trains, Buses. Still the kings.
@@Unethical.FandubsGames never gonna happen tho (in US). Ppl vote against their best interest simply to maximize selfishness and maintain class-based mentality and structures.
Woah woah wait a second I was on board with the mockery of Imperial units until I realised the British are the butt of the joke. Is this how it feels?! I am sorry Americans, I had no idea I had been so cruel!
At lease a British man (Watt) invented the metric system and we've now dropped the imperial system completely in science, maths and engineering. It's just old people who want to keep miles and gallons so they know how many miles per gallon their car does when they're buying petrol by the litre
All of Elon Musk's ideas are intended for use on Mars one day. He was intending on building a small tunnel on Chicago I believe, with shuttle cars. I'm not sure what happened with those plans. I heard these proof of concept have something to do with agreements of intellectual property and the company.
The technique Musk used to determine the target speed of the Hypeloop is termed pikitoutayabutt. 1000 kph is the speed needed to justify the project, so that's the speed on the view-graph. And that's the number that is uncritically reported as if it were an intrinsic property of things in tubes. No such thing will occur. Certainly not at a commercially viable price point. By the time there might be technology to make such a thing at all (as a performance art project?), that same technology will have cut the price of far more boring competitors. It is already clear that we can get wheels on steel trains up to about half that speed. Sure you'll pay 4x to cut a trip from 8 hours to 2. But you ain't gonna pay that to cut one from 3 hours to 1.5. And by that time what you'll be paying 4x for is a jet that barely gives you time to take your shoes off. Of course by that time some Meta-Musk will be pitching the Meta-hyperloop which moves so fast that it delivers you to your destination before you board. But also by that time, we will have conventional old time machines that can do the job for half the price.
@@granand virgin made a 1 km track. just had a modified airplane cockpit body put on wheels .. it went 100mph.. like normal trains do...then soon after virgin let go of half the emplyees.and not branson is planning to sell it off so virgin doesnt have to put enymore money in this bottomless pit
The biggeset takeaway I got from all Thunderf00t's videos about the hyperloop is the catastrophe that would happen if the hyperloop's vacuum were broken. All it takes is one leak along the entire length of the track and suddenly you have a wall of air coming at you at 761 mph. (5 times faster than a category 5 hurricane!) The entire line would have to be constantly maintained by specialist engineers, and patrolled by security to make sure it wasn't vandalized or terrorized.
@@poruatokin Applicable, but it is far easier to catastrophically sabotage hyperloop than planes or trains. Security only needs to be placed at terminals for air travel, because it's very difficult to vandalise or terrorize a plane without being on board and already going through security. Trains are on the ground, yes, so it's easier to sabotage without being on board, but a single bullet isn't going to derail a train. It will take longer to damage the tracks enough, which allows security cameras to give precious time to the drivers to emergency stop. And even if a high speed train derails and falls from a viaduct, like happened in the Wenzhou train collision in China in 2011, almost 80% of the passengers survived. No one in the pod would survive a single bullet breaching the hyperloop; no one in the entire pipe from end to end would survive.
@@jamesrockybullin5250 I'd question your assertion, so would the victims of 9/11. And, it would be very easy for someone of that mind to park themselves at the end of an airport runway (outside of security) with a suitable weapon to take pot-shots at aircraft taking off, filled with thousands of kilograms of highly inflammable fuel and lumbering into the sky it would not be difficult to create a disaster. But, if you live in a country of gun toting terrorists and that possibility is your major issue with this potential technology then I'd suggest that finding a high speed, environmentally friendly transport solution is not the biggest problem that needs to be solved in your society. But I thought the topic of the video was the engineering feasibility of hyperloop, not gun culture.
@@poruatokin If you are seriously suggesting that a hyperloop and conventional trains and plains are at anything like an equivalent level of risk then you either don't know what you are talking about or you are a hyperloop fanboy who refuses to listen to criticisms of what is currently at least a spectacularly impractical concept. Maintaining even low pressure in a long tube would be breathtakingly energy expensive. Its not remotely eco-friendly. Maybe, and I can't emphasise the "maybe" strongly enough; it might become practical in the future.
Thunderf00t's physics sucks. His ball bearing model does not scale to human size, due to the changing ratio of surface area to volume. Also, a pressure wave from any breach would quickly disperse in the vacuum, leaving a gradient of increasing air pressure, and a breach would not cause a structural collapse of any part of the tube, the forces involved in maintaining a tube at vacuum are not that large relative to the strength of a steel tube a few meters across.
No Sabine, the primary problem isn't financial, though that one's nigh insurmountable as well, it's absolutely safety. After an emergency stop has been initiated and assuming the passengers can survive 10g of deceleration (probably way too much; remember the break will push them against their seat belts, not the seat) and assuming the speed was only barely the speed of sound, it'd still be several hundreds of meters before the capsule would come to a stop. Any dynamics engineer worth his salt can calculate the vibrations from this system. Studies aren't really needed for that, and installing dampers can reduce vibrations. Putting the system on piles therefore isn't a particularly large problem because of that. Localised stresses from a variety of causes however are, and especially thermal expansion, and the huge amount of energy needed to be put into constantly pumping air out. A tube that doesn't have much of a vacuum will actually increase the aerodynamic resistance for the reason that air will have a harder time going around the capsule, and overpressure at the front and underpressure at the back will increase. Add to that the fact the absolutely nightmarish circumstances one will have to deal with for maintenance. The inner parts will be practically inaccessible unless the vacuum is disbanded, in which case, congrats, the air now needs to be pumped out again, and good luck finding any tiny hole that can completely ruin the fun. Because of thermal expansion many joints and components would have to have space to expand and move around, as day and night cycle alone would lead to elongated tube lengths and diameters. Uneven distribution of the heat at the top (because of sun, rain and snow) would further induce complex localised stresses. Add to that the robustness needed so that the whole thing doesn't get shredded if a local complete catastrophic failure occurs (like a terrorist detonating a bomb ripping a huge hole in part of the tube), because otherwise everyone in that tube at that time will die. I can go on and on, but the facts of the matter which you basically acknowledge, is that there's too little benefit for this idea for it to be worth the absolutely massive expenses needed to design, build and maintain it. The idea has existed since the late 19th or early 20th century by the way, and this is the precise reason why planes exist and this thing does not and probably never will. This cannot be stressed enough. Elon Musk is a snake oil peddler and little more. Every cent spent on this is a cent not only wasted but also lost to improving the public transport (and hypersonic rail) we so desperately need.
I’m pretty sure he only came up with the idea to sabotage the Californian high speed rail project. He didn’t want that to go ahead because, unlike most of his ideas that seem to come down to selling more Teslas, this would have reduced the need for Teslas. I think the name Hyperloop was a pretty ballsy troll, because he couldn’t fail to have noticed you only need to remove the “r” to end up with hype loop.
Glad to find other reasonable humans that do not fall for the "sigma male" bullshit and stupid worship for Musk. That guy is doing a lot of damage. It's very sad.
I think the vacuum problem alone is economically insurmountable. Achieving such large vacuum systems, is harder than most appreciate and incredibly energy intensive much less maintaining such vacuums over time. What is more, isolated loss of vacuum integrity in the system brings the risk of system-wide catastrophic failure. We may very well see the implementation of “trolleys in tubes” or high-speed subways” perhaps even “high-speed maglev subways” but I sincerely doubt they will run in vacuums as proposed.
Instead of even trying to vacuum, what are the limits of accelerating all the air in the tube (and along with it the caddy) like in the old office postal systems? I guess the air starts to friction at the tube but suppose you would accelerate the air to 1/2 mach and go another 2/3 mach relativ to the air with the vessel, one could achieve faster than sound travel without the vessel itself actually breaking the sound barrier, not?
High speed trains in tubes is definitely where we are going to go. Hyper loop style systems may exist, but they'll exist for military applications or the ultra rich. Don't have to worry about most of the problems if it's just a couple pods a day of super rich fucks.
In Chemical-Engineering/Synthesis, I've met people with excellent qualifications from first rank Universities but who don't have a practical bone in their bodies. The Hyperloop is primarily a great tool to use at engineering/science job interviews. Anyone who thought it to be practicable in the real world, is someone who shouldn't get the job.
Just curious, do you think Elon Musk has a practical bone in his body? Would you want him in your company? Considering one of his companies is the leading electric vehicle producer and the other is the largest commercial launch provider?
@@nikolatasev4948 Musk was an early investor in PayPal, not the founder, though he did sue in order to call himself "a founder"of PayPal. Likewise, Tesla was not founded by Musk, it was funded by Musk, the founder is elsewhere now. Tesla is absurdly overpriced, and a drop of 50% in its stock price would wipe out Musk altogether, due to leverage. The jury is still out on Space X, but I would like 1. to see him fly in his one of his own rockets and 2. explain what greater good is achieved by his firm if what it does amounts to very short extremely high-emissions joyrides for billionaires. Plus, now there's a new weird problem: there are TOO many satellites in space already, and hi-speed debris-generating collisions are expected to grow exponentially in the immediate future.
@@MegaMaxiepad Tesla was directly led by Musk for the majority of their rise, the original founder did not stick for long. Musk turned Tesla in what it now is - a massively profitable, and growing automaker. Musk owns a very large part of it. Even if the stock fell 60% he would still own a large part of a massive company. He is in a lot of debt, compared to you and me, but I don't think he is ~50 Billion in debt. If you have better sources - feel free to share them. SpaceX in not making their money from joyrides for billionaires. They had one such mission, and dozens of commercial satellites, plus many missions for the US government carrying satellites, cargo and people to the ISS. Each flight saves tens of millions of taxpayer dollars over what ULA or Russia would have charged for the same thing. I have no idea why you would wait for Musk to fly his own rocket, neither ULA nor the Chinese, Indian, Russian or European leaders have flown their own rockets. They have been very successful on the commercial market before Musk outcompeted them. Why the double standard on what makes a successful company? You may not like the side effects of the companies, but this is not my point. I asked if Musk had a practical bone in his body. His products dive and fly in the real world, and are outcompeting anything else in their direct market, so I think he does.
@@nikolatasev4948 Tesla has benefitted from massive govt subsidies to electric cars, a non-stop supply of hype and stunts (hyperloop, self-driving cars, trips to Mars) and an army of fanbois, while the cars themselves suffer from quality issues (Musk himself admits it). Standard rocket technology was developed over many decades, and many lives were lost. The much hyped US Space Shuttle was a bust in hindsight (two out of five exploded), and I insist, the jury is still out on Space X. And Tesla is simply not worth more than ALL car manufacturers in the world combined selling only 1% of all cars in the world. The scam was so appealing that a competing charlatan launched his own Tesla knock-off, the fully-fraudulent NIkola. And really, electric car tech is very old (about as old as the idea of a hyperloop), nothing truly revolutionary about it. And Musk's endorsement of bitcoin via Tesla, only to withdraw it a year later when it looked like it was time to cash out, reflects terribly on the guy. Again, he sued PayPal so that he could continue to call himself a founder? Does that sound like an honest thing to do?
@@nikolatasev4948 Nikola, that depends on how much he wanted me to pay him to be in my company. I would have in the marketing department, for sure. But not in any technical or manufacturing department.
I believe from a hypothetical standpoint the hyperloop is interesting. From a realistic standpoint it will be ultimately abandoned. It is an engineering nightmare, extremely complex to build and maintain and far to expensive.
It's possible , why ? Material engineering of Smart self repairing and self adjusting materials. Remember these are engineering problems not scientific ,someone will find a way There is demand so there will be money
@@cedriceric9730 Engineering is built upon scientific principles 🤦🏻♂️ Maybe in a fantasy world of self healing metal and magic the hyperloop can exist. In the real world, it’s a engineering nightmare.
"Hype going around in a loop" is my takeaway. Sure in a few decades with advancements in superconductors, maglevs in tunnels with reduced pressure may become feasible but at that point there's no reason to call them hyperloop since "train in vacuum" is an old idea. I was hoping that hyperloop hype would at least kick off some significant innovations in large scale vacuum systems but so far nothing groundbreaking seems to be brewing.
oh noo these are PODS in vacuum ToooooooooTALLY different, the number of idiots in this world is rising exponentially. Anyone who had ever dealt with vacuum tubes will tell you how difficult it is to pull air from a small chamber and keep it for prolonged periods of time, let alone the tube that will be several kilometres long.
I would bet that even without Hyperloop there already were a lot of use cases for a large scale vacuum chambers. Therefore if there were any low / medium hanging fruits to collect, somebody would have done it by now. For instance aren't all the particle accelerators circular vacuum tubes?
@@SimonWoodburyForget Feel free to pour your life's equity into it pal. That's capitalism right there. You are free to assume as much risk as you want for whatever payoff you want; cash, the enviro, SJW cred with your hipster friends at Starbucks etc.
@@julkiewitz The inner diameter of LHC(Large Hadron Collider) vacuum tube is some 50 mm, the inner diameter of Tesla hyperloop test tube is 3200 mm, just some 64 times larger than LHC vacuum tube, and ones in presentations are even larger, this is not to mention metal expansion, contamination, security issues....etc
@@MiguelRuiz-vp1hu Hes even wrong about that , hyperloops are coming This means one thing , those problems have been solved or engineers have 100% evidence they aren't actual problems
Maglev doesn't strictly require superconducting magnets (though we do finally have some decent ones now with ReBCO tape). The Inductrack-type maglev has strong advantages, including failsafe-at-speed operation and cheaper construction costs.
I love your humour Sabine. Perfectly dead pan! More importantly, thank you for explaining the system in a more technical, and less sensational way than other introductions to the concept. Yet also being quite clear about the potential benefits, pitfalls and dangers.
I see more problems, mainly that even at such high speeds, the small scale these things need to have if you want to go anywhere not in a 100% perfectly straight line (for which I can guarantee there will be no construction permission in 500 years from how many people go to court) makes them incredibly inefficient compared to existing rail systems, that can in total transport more passengers in the same time frame due to the distance you'd have to keep between pods for effective and safe braking maneuvers, and capacity is essential in high speed transport too. Then how do you design switchover points? There aren't gonna be arbitrary alternative routes in case of technical failures like a major leak in the tunnel, which would require you to close it off to maintain the vacuum and reroute pods onto non-existing alternative lines, aka you hold up all of the traffic until somebody bothers to drive out there and fix up the tunnel. The thing is, we have the technology for high speed rail and it's constantly improving. It's cheaper in comparison and far less sensitive and therefore technical failures have more manageable consequences. Trains can easily be rerouted onto old lines or side tracks, evacuation is much easier, the capacity higher and it still gets you to places at a decent enough speed. Especially high speed freight trains have lots of unused potential and some major countries plan to increase their cargo rail traffic for more than just environmental reasons. The way I see it, hyperloops are Gadgetbahns (for an explanation of this, see the explanation video on the RM Transit channel, though Germans can probably guess the meaning). It's fancy tech to show off with major practicality issues and unnecessary challenges (as per Virgin Hyperloop diagram) that can simply be avoided if people stopped beating around the bush, stopped being Elon Musk simps and simply built more high speed rail.
Indeed. Mass transit has been a solved problem for a century, tramways and busses work great especially with modern tech. People like Musk create more problems than they solve, their lobbying is screwing up our urban planning.
@@TheStephaneAdam especially his car tunnel with pods. It takes less space to just have the cars drive themselves or, you know, build a metro. Or his car tunnel that is a one lane tunnel without emergency exits to escape his exploding cars and has fancy rainbow lighting. It's all just so incredibly useless!
The most economical way to reduce air pressure and resistance for travel is flying to 40,000 ft. I also don't think any high speed rail is being delayed or cancelled because of Elon Musk one he isn't involved in any of the companies trying to do Hyperloops and hasn't put any money into any of them nor does he intend to as far as I've read. He threw out an idea, a bad one granted but I have plenty of bad ideas as do we all.
@@TheStephaneAdam Our urban planning are you talking about where you live or the general our. Because I find it pretty amazing that he has managed to screw up urban planning in general when he doesn't even have a stake in any of the Hyperloop companies atm. Urban planning and public transport is planned on the decades time frame and depending on scale can take 5 to 10 years per project. Maybe you were being hyperbolic?
@@deepwinter77 The hyperloop was proposed at the same time as California announced it was starting a high speed rail project. There were delibrate comparisons made to convince people that the hyperloop would be a better investment due to superior speeds. Elon Musk owns a car company, those firms benefit immensely from under investment in public transit.
Being in a vacuum the capsules would need life support systems similar to a spaceship with the added constraint of the tunnel walls preventing cooling by passive radiation of any internally generated heat.
@@Vaasref what is the amount of energy needed to evacuate the air from the atmosphere of Earth at 100,000ft? Will this cause the Earth to implode and destroy the aircraft? The answers are ZERO and NO.
You could use a heat pump to radiate heat at significantly above the ambient temperature of the tube walls, which would then quite readily absorb it. It's a lot of extra effort on top of something that's already a lot of extra effort though. Most of the prototypes have had onboard heat sinks, E.G blocks of ice, which also doesn't strike me as very practical for mass transit.
The "train in a vacuum tube" concept has been around for over 200 years, and hasn't been realized yet. People like to joke about fusion power being perpetually "only 20 years away". But the vacuum train is even worse!
@@minerscale Plus, HUGE DIFFERENCE: HUMANS HAVE ABSOLUTELY MADE PROGRESS IN FUSION OVER THE PAST 100 YEARS! BUT ZERO progress has been made with the problems of this Hyperloop BULLSHIT!
@@minerscale Well the last time the prediction of fusion was actually shifted to less than 20 years. Still worthy of the joke but there have been several serious breakthroughs on that subject... and none on vacuum trains. (Precisely what Mr. Ultimate Reductionist said)
Passengers would also need CO2 scrubbers to be able to breath as the Hyperloop pod would be in the same environment as spacecrafts. Also, what if the tube would break, causing a front of air invading it and smashing at that speed as concrete against the capsule? What if the capsule would loose integrity causing instant death to the passengers due to suffocation and causing the Bends? What about the minimum safe distance between different capsules which will effect Hyperloop's passengers per hour transport capability compared to the high capability of a high speed train? Also, If you are in a pressurized pod while outside there is near vacuum, in the case of significant loss of hull integrity the pod would depressurize instantly and the lungs of the people on board would burst killing them instantly. No sort of mechanical intervention to re-pressurize the tube would act fast enough to prevent this. And so on and so on...
When I was three years old, I hypothesized that if your car was just longer, say like ten miles or even one hundred miles long, you could just walk from the back of the car to the front to get to your destination. That should be pretty fast as it takes hardly anytime to go from the back to the front of your car. Then I grew up and turned 3 and half.
I worked in the 80s at a company that sold low pressure plasma systems to deposit protective coatings on jet engine airfoils, doing industrial automation. I'm going to use torr as that was the unit we used back then; torr is mm of mercury. Atmospheric is about 760 torr, or something like 640 torr at high altitudes. The vacuum chamber was about the size of an SUV with preheat transfer chambers about 3' long and 1.5' in diameter. Parts would be loaded into the transfer/preheat chamber, air pumped out, and after preheat, an inter-chamber gate was opened for the part to enter the main chamber. One thing I remember was that it was a bitch keeping all the seals in good enough condition in order to get down to 20 torr. 100 pascal is 0.75torr. I can not imagine how maintaining a tunnel hundreds of miles long, or even a single mile is possible.
I've ridden the AVE in Spain (310kph / 193 mph). A reasonably priced very smooth quiet ride and thrilling to see the countryside zip by so fast. I can't even begin to imagine the cost of building and maintaining vacuum tubes over those distances. How much time do you lose by having to cycle through airlocks? What does a catastrophic failure of a several hundred mile vacuum tube look like?
Messy, and the clean up crew would need trauma therapy after the job. There was a saturation diving accident with an explosive decompression of a pressure chamber. one guy literally exploded, 2 boiled instantly, and the guy who opened the hatch lost his arm, died too. In a hyperloop, you would most likely be pulled through a leak like in an Airplane at the edge of the stratosphere, and whatever pieces are too big, ground along the walls until you are a smear, i doubt there would be more left than something, you clean with a waterhose. Maybe a tooth or so spread over hundreds of meters.
@@Gunni1972 i dont think you'd get sucked through a hole in the pod. At least not a small hole. After all the pressure difference is at most 1 bar, so the force is about 1 kg/cm2. So in that way it will not be as bad as the accident you mentioned. As long as the hole is no larger than a coin, I guess you could just put your hand over it. However! If the tube breaks, you have a problem. If you are going towards the place where it is broken, your pod will be met with a wall of air that's coming towards you. I'm not sure how violent the braking will be, but I'm guessing it won't be fun. And if the tube breaks behind you, the air that rushes in will accelerate the pod uncontrollably. The Mythbusters once made a ping pong ball go faster than the speed of sound by putting it in a vacuum tube and opening the tube in one end. I guess more or less the same would happen in the hyperloop. It would be a mess for sure. I think the whole concept is nonsense. How would one evacuate someone that is stuck in a pod in a vacuum tube?
The difference is in the power consumed to maintain speed. At top speed a train is using virtually 100% of its rated power to punch a hole through the air. Hypeloop is not a replacement idea for trains - it is a replacement for airliners.
Yes vft are great, I have ridden the Maglev between Pudong and Shanghai several times. It runs regularly at 420 kmh. Very impressive but not as smooth as wheeled vfts like Eurostar.
@@jimgraham6722 The reason why the German built Pudong Maglev is not smooth is because it was built in a hurry over marshland as a political prestige project. I rode it shortly after it was built many years ago during very windy conditions but it was surprisingly smooth then....but that was before it starting sinking.
Basically if you fly an airplane and it suffers a mid-air disintegration at 12 km altitude, you will die comparably to potentially dying in a leaky hyperloop capsule.
I would say there is too much hype around hyperloop technology. It gets too much attention for having no good practical examples, it distracts from things like trains which are pretty fast these days and have significantly higher capacity/bandwidth than any hyperloop proposal I've seen, and can be made significantly more comfortable and safe. Moving away from cars, even electric (huge energy cost and waste generation in production) is going to be an important step for us as a society to address climate issues, as well as make travel something more accessible to those who are less well off. We need to exploit our current technology to the fullest before we dream about implementing things like hyperloop. I'm not saying engineers and futurists are bad people if they want to think about hyperloop. But nations and cities should not be investing in it, their attention should be on implementing the practical and proven.
In order to build a TGV Alstom railway, geography and demographics aren't the biggest friends of your main ideas. You cannot combine transportations of goods thanks to trains with bullet trains in order to reduce fuel consumption. You won't have enough railway tracks. The moment you'll start to break down the problem, the network would not allow you to do whatever you think is the best. It's an illusion of choice.
Public transport isn’t as great for climate. Busses aren’t much better than passengers driving in gas cars, and much worse than driving in electric cars. Trains are better but still about the same as EVs. Future EVs will be smaller and more efficient so they’ll have even smaller carbon footprints.
@@llothar68 May his fully autonomous, self driving cars deliver us unto the store for smokes an not run over a bicyclist on its right or the central median. Amen.🙏
I suggest the levitated hyper network. You lift the passenger compartments to a high altitude in the atmosphere. There a natural 2.5 dimensional surface / volume of low pressure exists for extended travel at low pressure. The compartments can travel from any start point to any end point without a point to point tube, allowing for flexible reroutings for changing demands. Chances in speed or direction will hardly be felt by the passenger because the trajectory of the compartment will adapt dynamically and automatically. The compartments will be suspended by attached airfoils and propelled by internal combustion engines or jet engines. You are welcome.
@@SwampCityRadio1974 Oh, an aeroplane. Oh, I say, we are grand, aren't we? Oh, oh, no more buttered scones for me, mater. I'm off to play the grand piano.
It's quite literally a pipe dream. You need only one small hole in the tube to have air rushing in, ripping the tube apart and traveling as a shock-wave inside it...
Thats wrong, look into the physics of compressible fluids. Especially critical flow of gasses. The air rushing in is limited by the size of the hole, as its flow velocity through can't excess the speed of sound. As a reference: the ISS had multiple holes.
This is _far_ too "optimistic" about H-L. I'm a professional engineer who has dealt with railways and large industrial plant. H-L is possible, as is anything that does not break the laws of physics : you just need to throw lot and _LOTS_ of money at it. H-L will need _huge_ amounts of money to make it a practical proposition, but it will never be an economic one.
It's just daft...who is going to spend billions on a tunnel that implodes spectacularly the first time someone decides to poke a hole in it?! Why spend all that money on infrastructure when you can throw a plane into the air with just an airport at either end (simplified I know). I like Elon but you have to understand that for every genius thing he does, he comes out with 50 pipe dreams...this is one of them
Yes, the Hyperloop would fail on economics, being more expensive and inferior in every other way than speed to existing alternatives or even non-vacuum maglev. But it would also fail on maintainability and safety. The walls of the vacuum tubes and all discontinuities in them (welds, expansion joints, vacuum suction points, stations for passenger boarding/unboarding etc.) would be exposed to extreme wear and thermal expansion problems. For maintenance, you would have to stop all traffic and let air in, and then send some non-vacuum maintenance vehicle across the tube. You would have to sweep the inside of the tunnel clean of any rust, dust or (worst case) small chunks of metal broken off at the stations or vacuum suction points. The first thing one would think of with regards to safety is explosive depressurization in case something damages the tube - but there are several other issues. In modern rail tunnels, there are all kinds of safety systems to help evacuation & firefighting, _none_ of which are applicable to a vacuum tube and pressurized capsules within it, they would be death traps (and not just the capsule suffering an accident, but all those stuck behind it). The capsules would have to work not even like airplanes but like spaceships, with autonomous air supply & purification, and enclosed-space fire protection.
@@Daneelro Doesn't really matter, whatever people think of him he's made stuff happen that not many (if any) could have done the way he has. I've run my own businesses and making shit actually happen the way you want it is hard. He's done it on an epic scale...more than once.
I think the sealings are also a big problem. You have a vacuum in the tube, but pressure in the capsule. And you need airlocks at the stations. And they have to work perfectly if you dont want to die.
Yeah and talk about termal expansion in a vacuum tube. They are literally going to have to invent some kind of vacuum seal that contracts and expands with the material. This thing has huge problems.
That’s not a big deal. You don’t actually need perfect seals on the capsules any more than is already done with airplanes. And in the tube it doesn’t need to be perfect either you just need the vacuum pumps to be able to keep up.
@@JayVal90 And where do you get the air to keep the pressure up in the leaking (like an airplanes) capsule? The same tube you are trying to vacate to a vacuum?
@@benghazi4216 Yes. It’s called a compressor pump. You don’t need a complete vacuum in the tube, and the more vacuum the faster you go (so more to compress)
I work with both very large vacuum and very large pressurised gas system. No sealing is 100% perfect and they dont have to be. Tehy all leak at soem rate - they just have to seal at 99.999% - and this is easy and known engineering. The chances of a seal going from 99.999% to suddenly 0% sealing can be engineered to be less than chance of being hit by lightning. Remember vacuum is at -1 Bar. Gas systems - especially deadly harardous gas system are often high pressure - a few bar to 100Bar. You find them all around you. But they don't fail or kill you (mostly). A non issue (IMHO)
The Hyperloop is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Or rather, it's a solution looking for a problem. Trains are just better for medium distance travel and planes are just better at long distances with way more flexibility. Besides, mass transit is not just an engineering problem. It's mainly a political one as well. The Hyperloop will run into the same problems that high speed rail is running into in North America, which is NIMBYISM.
It's the answer to rails problems Rail is feasible for Europe and Japan but America is a massive first world country , making maglevs to cover the distances will cost as much as Hyperloop with even less utility! 😂😂
@@cedriceric9730 Idiotic analysis. What relevance does the size of America have to the problem at hand? You are aware that India, China, and Russia have massive railway networks, right? It's because the Americans organised their entire transportation infrastructure around cars and there are now massive political and economic pressures to keep the traffic circus going. Nothing to do with being "first world".
@@remliqa Also, The person from the YT channel "The Action Lab" , put his forearm in a vacuum chamber. Even with little vacuum, his hand was swelling quick. th-cam.com/video/iWGGMchu6mQ/w-d-xo.html
Hey Sabine, since you are German I assume you are well aware of the extrodanary success of the "Transrapid" or as the rest of the world called it the "Maglev". The Transrapid works perfectly fine (I know coz I used in in Shanghai), the one problem with the train is that it is ridiculously expensive to build the track, due to the reasons you already explained in your video. Now here comes the question, when you add to an existing Transrapid track a vacuum tube how can it make things cheaper? I have only 13th grade math skills but in my mind if I add something to a given value, then the value increases. So as long as we can't find anybody who is willing to build the vacum tube for free and additionally would contribute money to the whole project without the desire to get anything in return, as long as this is the case, the hyperloop will not start off, not today and not in a million years. Oh and btw I am sure that you are very aware that the highest drag on an airplane is produced by the wings, but if it does not need to fly and when can put it on rails we can just skip the wings, so a plane on rails is right from the start the better version of hyperloop.
Indeed this is also exactly why it is already theoretically possible to make a regular maglev run at 1000 km/h without needing the tube. I believe China is working on the test track for such a system, will have to see what speed it achieves in practice. Japan has been running their tests at up to 603 km/h but they only had a speed target of around 600 km/h anyway for their system I believe. But yeah the system gets a lot more practical if you figure out how to do it without the tube as you are no longer limited to very low frequencies due to it taking an hour or more to redraw the vacuum in the station airlocks before each train arrives. It is well known a transit system needs frequencies better than that ie at least once every 20-30 minutes or so in order to attract good ridership as people need to know there will be a transit vehicle available close to the desired time of travel throughout the day.
For me the Hyperloop is purely a publicity stunt resp. a fun toy for tech nerds of a university to TRAIN (lol) solving techical problems. Only maglev would make sense, but I do not know of much effort to get the maglev technlology into a Hyperloop tube. It is still all on wheels. And I do NOT want wheels at 1000 mph. They show streamlined pods (when there is no drag in a vacuum???), and know that here are 28 passengers. But there is NOTHING about the technical installations. The speed advantage makes only sense in a real-world application when you cover long distances, several hundred miles. That means you must send MULTIPLE pods into the tube, and extract them from the tube IN TIME. What happens when there is an issue with the airlock? The pods would queue up in a hermetically sealed steel tube, until the airlock is repaired. When something happens, a pod must be able to stop on its own - And it needs an autonomous life support system - for several hours in any case. How do you insert the pods into the airlock of the tube? The planned clearance of the pod in the tube is mere inches. So you cannot squeeze past it. The access hatch is planned at the side. So you cannot get out of the pod in the tunnel. Even when you cut off the front or back end of the pod, it is still in the way, it fills the whole diameter. You would have to cut up the end into small pieces until you get past the remains. It is just 28 people/pod, but promised to be a cheap mass transport system. It is unavoidable that you enter the pod, it is sealed, then you have to wait in the hermetically sealed pod until it is your turn in the airlock You will probably be able to calculate the capacity of the tube simply by calculating the braking distance from full speed to zero, that is the minimum distance between two pods. For a plane, to slow down, you just have to reduce thrust, then the drag slows you automatically down, the faster, the more you are slowed down. In a vacuum tube, there is nothing like that. So the autonomous emergency brake must be able to provide all the energy to destroy the kinetic energy of a 1,000 kph pod in, say, a minute, which is already a good 6 km (4 mls) braking distance with 5m/s^2 (1/2g) braking. The technology is not the problem. But the logistics of a mass transport system - THAT makes it not feasible in ANY way.
@@feedingravens With a maglev the emergency braking is usually accomplished by installing systems that allow the vehicle to safely exploit the loss of levitation when the drive system fails to massively increase friction and thus stop the vehicle without destroying it in the process. Basically gravity takes over without the magnets driving it to levitate and it falls onto some alternate support system that both supports the vehicle safely and produces a ton of friction this could be skis or wheels mounted on high friction bearings or with permanently applied friction brakes or whatever. Sure the craft will essentially fall a couple of inches in this event but this is manageable with shock absorbers on the mountings of this equipment you are talking a few tens of centimetres per second down at impact, well within the range of the shock absorption components of aircraft landing gear etc (Typically those are designed for a ground collision at a vertical speed of -1.5 metres per second or so).
@@seraphina985 that is no quite accurate. The emergancy breake of transrapid is a ediecurrent breake just like on high speed train. The friktion plate is a total system failure fallback. It also don't destroy the train. The plate just need changing. So far that system have never been used in a emergancy. Only in testning.
@@matsv201 Yeah I guess I should have pointed out the fact that even without power the train will still levitate from the induced current in the coils while it is still moving fast enough. But ultimately the point will come where the current will drop to the point the magnetic field wont be sufficient to fully support the weight of the train so what goes up will come down eventually. My point was mostly that there are ways to handle that worst case scenario safely though, as I say we can build landing gear that takes the impact load of an A380 carry 600fpm of vertical speed this is really not a huge problem. Especially since by the time it does come to rest it will probably have a somewhat similar horizontal speed I guess, it wont still be doing 500 or 1000 km/h as there is more than enough energy in it's momentum to power the magnets still then.
2:22 The problem already - "trains could reach 430 km/h". Well, that's what the Shanghai Maglev Train already reaches, and especially in Switzerland, you probably can't go that much faster as you still need to stay below certain G values, not only for safety, but also for comfort, and also below certain speeds if the tube or tracks have to be curved.
Shanghai Maglev train, unfortunately, is an extremely expensive money-sink. Sure, it's fast (I've ridden it) but it is absolutely not economically viable. A normal electric train at 2/3 the speed but 1/5 the cost would be a much better solution.
I loved the joke at 2:25 ;) As an engineer I'm very skeptical about the Hyperloop ever since I first heard about it. Creating and maintaining such a large volume with vacuum just wouldn't be economically viable and there are plenty of safety concerns. Sure it's a cool idea and it's fun to think about how would we solve the engineering problems, but ultimately I highly doubt we will ever see a large scale public transport based on Hyperloop.
@@runningman5871 Being able to solve hard engineering problems is one thing, making the solution safe and profitable enough is another. I see much more similarity with Concorde, which finally failed on exactly these points and that's why we don't have supersonic passenger planes right now, even though the engineering challenges were solved many decades ago. Also consider the alternatives - we already have buses, trains, taxis etc. all of which are slower, but much cheaper (like current passenger planes).
While the technical challenges may seem tempting to solve, the question remains, how fast do we need to go? Would it be worth a five thousand dollar ticket just to get somewhere twice as fast? Everyday passenger jets travel from 400 to 600 mph, and a ticket can be had for a few hundred dollars. The number of people who would be willing to pay 5 times that much to go twice as fast would be few. It’s a solution looking for a problem, the truth is, no one really needs to go that fast. If the Concorde were built today, using modern materials, I’m sure they could solve the problems that eventually grounded the historic aircraft. But no one is doing it, why? Because there is no demand.
@@alphagt62 Demand is a mysterious thing. Just before railroads and trains, people was also wondering what kind of mad hurry would make other people want to risk their lives traveling at the insane speed of 50 km/h. Sometimes, when the technology is ready, the demand just appears (but not always)
@@juanausensi499 Okay let's assume with 100% certainty the demand will appear, should we do this anyway? It's an insanely resource intensive project that requires a lot of maintenance which won't impact 99.999% of peoples lives in any way whatsoever. In a time when environmental concerns are high and we are becoming increasingly aware of the limited nature of our resources, should we invest our resources and brainpower in this effectively useless thing... Probably not and certainly not with public tax money. We just have far bigger problems to solve without making said problems even worse just to improve the QoL for a few people. Maybe in the future when things are looking brighter but right now it seems like a bad idea overall.
Put ultra dense Polyethylene, a more lubricant surface than Teflon, in the base of the tube and another layer on the bottom of the train, build the train and the base with capillary tubes for water and have pumps controlled by computers inside the train that pump soapy water to the outside of the Poly to maintain a hydraulic layer between the train and the tube bottom. A wheel system will need to be deployable as needed to move the train at slower speeds in emergencies and for maneuverability in the station and for parking, maintenance, and workshop procedures.
Hyperloop is a good idea in principle, but NOT practical. It happened a lot. Something invented, which is VERY good, but has serious drawbacks, and the benefits can not justify the high efforts.
Just in case Its been missed the idea dates back to pre 1800, Brunel had an "atmospheric railway" working in Devon in UK in 1844. It was not a succedd though. The buildings are still there beside the replacement normal railway.
The atmospheric railway was very uncharacteristic for Brunel, who normally didn't come up with nonsensical projects. It is beyond me, how he could ever have thought that one could keep a tolerable pressure difference with a slot open at the top, 'sealed' with two leather flaps, and the train connected with a kind of piston through a moving gap between those flaps. The hyperloop is still a very different concept, though not likely to be economically sensible or safe enough.
Hyperloop is interesting as a hypothetical concept and I understand that this is a physicists' perspective. But to me the biggest issue with the Hyperloop is the potential for it to take away from investment in green technology that already works: good old electric passenger rail (doesn't have to be high speed for most routes)
it doesnt theoretically work because the distances needed to accelerate it to the speed where the lack of air makes a difference cannot be achieved on any train line on earth I don't remember russia planning to build a direct china-europe line so every single one of these is a scam, unless you're giving the benefit of the doubt to professionals working on this as their main job that they have not figured out the already well known main issue with the concept their entire project and salary is dependant on
@@andrewpaulhart Nice try, but this whataboutism doesn't apply here. @ unknownPLfan is talking about investments in infrastructure and there's a difference between unrelated industries and money being diverted from reasonable investments into inefficient vapourware targeting the same problem (i.e. public transport infrastructure).
@@anonymous-rb2sr > because the distances needed to accelerate it to the speed where the lack of air makes a difference cannot be achieved on any train line on earth Repeat after me: "Tokyo-Osaka".
Much of the time, I am so enthralled by your superb diction and flawless delivery that I lose track of what we are discussing today! I could listen to SH all day - and sometimes do.
There is another technical problem : security distances. The faster you go the more delay in between vehicle is needed to minimize the severity of accidents, should something wrong happen. To keep the corridor capacity reasonably high, and thus share the infrastructure cost on more people, you need to stuff up each vehicle, and that is not compatible with pods.
Hmmm... lets say we have figured out how to make trains with large enough cabin and move just fast enough to depart every 3 minutes. Will this good enough to throw hyperloop out the window?
@@geoffrygifari3377 not exactly : for a single track the minimum delay between each train is dominated by the speed at which they go (and signaling considerations : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headway ). The faster you go, the lower the train frequency, and this has to be compensated by making big trains and filling them up, because building and maintenance of the infrastructure is ultimately paid by the passengers. With pods, hyperloop systems propose a pitiful maximum of 2000 passenger per direction per hour, the same as one line of a highway. For a comparison, the shinkansen on the Tokyo-Kyoto line operate at ten times that, with fares somewhere around 120-160$ for a 475 km (300 miles) and 2h trip, without putting everything under a vacuum. The proposed fares given by hyperloop developers are just outlandish.
From what I understand, the speeds where this thing would be thinkable are such that if all the practical difficulties were to be overcome, we would end up with a vastly more expensive and orders of magnitude more hazardous version of a high-speed train.
when you understand the physics and the technical difficulties of projects like these you realise why many things people dreamed about won't happen in these decades but also open the opportunity to get creative
While fast , and efficient transportation is a good thing there are also other good things. Some might call them pressing needs. How about things we routinely hear about? Human trafficing prevention or freeing enslaved people. Illiteracy, misinformation and DISINFORMATION reforms. Hunger and malnutrition solutions. Female freedom from honor killing. Homelessness solutions. Care for mental illness victims. Drug addiction cures. We may think we have got this all under control. It just means, if you think that, you are lost in the weeds and are clueless.
@@josephtraficanti689 These sound like issues mostly found in other countries, though. While I agree these happen in many places, as a country we have a limited amount of resources and a constant pressure to be better. Things like honor killings, extreme sexism, many types of terrorism etc sound more like religious/cultural things that are up to the originating countries or sections of the world to fix. Our job here in the west would be to simply stop that from coming here and focus instead in some of our more modern problems. There are also many organizations, movements, and even government departments focused on many of the issues you listed above. They are just not as well-known because a sci-fi train sounds better.
@@josephtraficanti689 All those issues are simply due to dumb and stupid humans. The ONLY solution is global genocide alone the line of a James Bond supervillain to remove the stupid and the greedy and reboot the planet.
If you do the math for the thermal expansion of a 600 Km tube made of medium-high grade steel (SS316), you will immediately find that such a long tube can't be made. Moreover, the thickness of the tube wall, in order to resist without deformation to 100 Pascal of internal pressure, would make it prohibitively expensive. It has to resist to almost 1 kg/cm² of pressure! Also, to hold 100 Pascal inside for such a big volume, you need a vacuum pump every 10 meters. The power consumption of all vacuum pumps for 600 km of length is literally insane. I agree that the hyperloop is hype going in loop. The hyperloop is a transportation system suitable for environments already in a vacuum, like the lunar surface, where you don't need a tube to keep the vacuum. Just like transporting humans to Mars while keeping them in full health (by countering the lack of gravity and the strong solar/cosmic radiation), the hyperloop is another example of possible-but-unfeasible endeavour...
What's scary is, if the gap between the car and the tube is as small as I've seen illustrated, how do emergency exits even work? Assuming there's a power failure, even if there's atmosphere in the tube, how do you even get out of the car and get to the tube exit? You'd have to wait for someone outside to find your car, and then drag/tow it to the exit.
if the tunnel loses power but the train is fine, perhaps you could have batteries/back up fuel cells of some sort to drive the train at low speeds to an emergency airlock, maglev trains already have wheels to get them going at low speeds. Or you could exit though the front or back of the train after the tunnel outside has breathable air. There's probably no way for it to be as safe as a train, but it only needs to be as safe as concorde or other compareable transport services.
@@plainText384 1. They didnt propose wheels. 2. There are soooooo many problems that make this improbable enough to be financially impossible the one you mentioned fades into insignificance. 3. Concorde had one of the worst commercial aviation crashes and isnt in service anymore.
@@GahMehGrrrr1. the sort of magnetic levitation that trains use only works once you have already achieved a certain speed (the maglev trains in japan need to go about 150 km/h to hover 10 cm above the air) so maglev trains have tires that fold in after going fast enough for the magnets to support the full weight of the train at a safe hight above the train.
@@GahMehGrrrr 2. Fixing safety issuses is mostly seperate from commercial viability 3. Thats exactly my point, it doesn't have to be super safe to use, after all they thought the concorde was safe enough to make it a reality. The bar to clear for supersonic passenger transport isn't set super high.
As a structural engineer, I've followed your channel for a while now. I've learned a lot about a number of very esoteric subjects, thank you for all your efforts in communicating science so well. And now I thank you for citing my own work on the hyperloop bridge dynamics!
@@nicholasalexander3234 Keep on brother! Btw, do you think hyperloop is a feasible concept to materialize today, or is it just a less efficient bullet train - or as Sabine said "hype in a loop"?!
@@yugen3968 Yes, it is within the reach of current technology, but there are a number of difficult design challenges typical of completely novel design projects. The heart of the conceptual design is to balance cost, risk and what is technically achievable. This balance is the art of engineering, imagining, intuiting a good solution, understanding the physics and mathematics, and then creating something that never was! The problems of vibrations, earthquakes, thermal expansion, vacuum maintenance, transition curves etc are all surmountable problems. I think that someone will do it in the next couple of decades.
I'm a little surprised by the relative positivity of this video compared to how actually impractical hyperloops seem if you start really calculating anything. Isn't the larger problem the amount of potential energy that such a large vacuum chamber would represent simply due to the difference in pressure between the inside and out? You mentioned some things which would threaten the security of the vacuum, but not so much what would happen if it would fail. If we even take a short 10km track which has a radius of about 2m, say would have a volume of 125 million litres or so, so multiplying that by an approximately 100kPa difference in pressure gives us about 1.25 * 10^10 joules of potential energy, or about 3 tons of TNT -- roughly a third of a ton of TNT per kilometre is surely enough energy to do severe damage to the entire track and any of its inhabitants should the vacuum containment fail. Nevermind that if this should happen toward one end of the tube, it turns the rest of the tube into what is effectively the barrel of a giant gun for firing passenger cars. A 2 ton car on the edge of the pressure wave would see a 1.25 MN force and be accelerated at roughly 64g, which, though admittedly a very rough estimate, is solidly in the range of pretty terrifying and deadly. Note that the largest vacuum chamber in the world at present is NASA's Space Power Facility, which, if we're looking at the outer chamber that gets pumped down to 2kPa or so, is a mere 58 million litres, and for that, it consists of concrete that is around 2 metres thick, encasing a leak-tight steel containment barrier embedded in the concrete. Hyperloop folks talk about vacuum chambers running much longer distances between cities -- especially as you can't accelerate up to such high speeds on too short of a track, so the numbers quickly dwarf my 125 million litre example above. The fact that the vacuum is going to constantly leak at some rate and represents so much energy means that it's very easy for the power consumption of the pumps to be insanely high. Once you have a track that's many kilometres long, with all sorts of joints that need to be perfectly airtight (and being destroyed by expansion and contraction), it's very difficult to imagine how this will be maintained. In short, it seems both extremely wasteful, and extremely unsafe. Even if we can do it, we probably ought not to. How about just building some more ordinary maglev trains?
Perhaps they could suck out the air (partially) only in that segment ,where a split second later the train arrives?? That would take good AI but we have that now. The rest of the tube might want to fill that near vacuum but "too late". However they could not obtain a near vacuum in one movement, in one split second but only low pressure I think.
@@jean-pierredevent970 pulling a vacuum is not that fast, and your idea hinges on still wasting that potential energy between trains, so you have to depressurize everything every time a train passes, menaing an even bigger energy consumption than before
I mean even maglev trains are kind of dumb, an high speed train gets almost to the same velocity and there is much more know how on how to do it good and efficiently. plus its track are compatible with other trains and can arrive in normal ass stations
@@jean-pierredevent970 That would be way worse. I'll assume 100m sections, but the section length doesn't matter much. A 100m section of 3.3m hyperloop has about 3500m^3 volume. A transsonic train would be arriving at that 100m section at 343 m/s, which means it will be in that section for less than 300ms. And you want to evacuate the air in that section, so let's say it's already kept to a nominal pressure of 1/2 atm (still quite a lot of PE). You still need to move over two tons of air out of each section. A train at one end of the track will have to have the tube cleared out ahead of it, and hopefully it's self evident that moving 2 tons of air in 300ms is nuts. Let's say the train waits until the tube has been cleared to the halfway point, and it's 100km long in total. That's 500 x 100m sections that need to be cleared out. Budget be damned, let's put a huge vacuum pump on each section. Assuming a gentle acceleration of 1/3g, the train will reach 343m/s when it's 22.3km down the track, after 117 seconds, and will reach midway in an additional 81 seconds (198 total, we'll call it 200). So before it reaches that first section, it needs to evacuate 2 tons of air in 200 seconds. The power requirement can be calculated as Power = ΔP×V/t (difference in pressure times volume, over time), and that works out to 0.87 MW (megawatts, enough to power over 700 homes), if such a pump existed, for that *one* section of tube *assuming perfect efficiency and ignoring heat transmission line losses,* which is insane, and the other sections still need to be evacuated as well. And I don't really see how each section is going to be sealed independently with any kind of speed and safety. Even if it could be done, the energy requirements for the pumps alone would be orders of magnitude worse than an ordinary atmospheric pressure maglev.
I find it very hard to picture how this could be economically viable - the hyperloop would be buying a stack of hard, expensive technological problems in order to get rid of air resistance - when probably it would be better to find a way of just living with the air resistance.
Part of the problem was Musk trying to get away from the train concept by use of small pods. Most of the air resistance of a train at high speed comes from nose and tail effects. The length of the train between has little effect so a good smooth modern train bodyshell, designed to run through ground-level air pressure on earth on rails or maglev is actually fairly efficient in this respect, but as many cars as possible need to be crammed between the front and rear fairings to obtain maximum benefit. Musk rejects the notion of large coupled trains running (say) every 30 minutes however, in favour of tiny pods every few seconds, hence vacuum is required because of all that cumulative nose and tail resistance. Control tech also faces significant challenges safely keeping these many pods sufficiently separated in motion. I say to have any hope, companies working on this need to lose the vacuum tube and mechanically couple the pods together into a conventional length train.
@@cedriceric9730 I don't think I've seen what I think is a proper estimate of the costs... But constantly pumping down huge vacuum tubes isn't going to be free. Musk seems pretty confident the capital costs will be lower than the conventional high speed rail being built all over the world... Conventional rail is surprisingly expensive to build but a lot of that that's cos its got to be engineered to be really safe, really reliable and really durable.
Short version: We can start building them around the time we can power them with fusion reactors scattered along the way. Now... what was the current (running) prediction for an operational fusion reactor?
30 years ago, Fusion was "50 years away and always would be." 10 years ago fusion was "30 years away and always would be." Now fusion is 20 years away and people like you aren't paying attention so the fossil fuel industry can easily manipulate you. Cheers!
@@totalermist Just as we have a few maglev train samples out there, but still far from being practical. As with the others, hyperloop is a nice concept that may one day become a reality, but to date, it has no financial relevance. Meaning, nobody will build a profitable public transportation system based on it any time soon. And we are talking about decades here. It doesn't mean the concept has to be discarded, but to stay in Elon-world, people will walk on Mars before this happens.
Thanks for the hands per fortnight, really appreciate the inclusion :) We also quite enjoy a furlong or two (the average distance a team of oxon can plough before requiring a rest, or 1/8th of a mile).
I got the 'hands per fortnight' but I dont understand what it means. No doubt it's a kick in the goolies. I have travelled on the Shanghai magnetic train at 430 km per per hour. It was built by the Germans. The Brits had one first at B'ham airport so I expect the Germans stole our designs hehe
interesting, Sabine didn't go into the forces acting on an evacuated tunnel with such a radius and the difficulty of maintaining the vaccuum over many kilometers. I guess the only thing of anywhere close to similar dimensions is the evacuated tunnel for the beamline magnets (insulation vaccum) at the LHC which i think has a radius of ~0.5m and is 27km long with ~200m long subsections. The vacuum is ofcourse overkill for a hyperloop at ~e^-6 mbar (~5 e-3mbar after 200hrs of pumping) according to a CERN brochure i found by Paul Cruikshank.
I'm skeptical about the hyperloop concept, but how much of a difference is this compared to planes? If a plane tube breaches catastrophically , people die. If there is a a small breach in a plane, the pilot drops the plane to a save height. If a small breach occurs in the hyperloop wagon, maybe a section of the tube could be flooded with air.
@@steffenpanning2776 A plane can perform an emergency descent. A capsule stuck in the tube cannot. And in the case of a tunnel, any rescue mission would be very difficult.
@@skipperg4436 First, passenger planes do not fly in the stratosphere; 70 hPa is roughly 18 km altitude (pilots who fly that high have pressure suits). Second, they can descend rapidly to save the passengers and it did work many times. A hyperloop capsule cannot.
Mm.... I'm gonna be bolder, it won't happen in the next 8 decades. I feel like Sabine in this video severely underestimated the magnitude of problems mentioned.
Oh I'm sure at least ONE city will fall for the hype and sink billions of taxpayer money into making it a reality. It will be useless and bankrupt said city.
You didn't really mention just how insanely dangerous vacuum tubes are. If one implodes--and they do so quite forcefully--everyone in the entire tube for hundreds of miles may die.
I just thought about traveling from the west coast of Europe to the east coast of northern America. Some 100 years ago, and before it, it took you about a week to do it by ship, maybe even a bit longer. Then came the airplane, and eventually it would take some eight hours. That meant a huge gain in time, and relatively cheap. Then one may think of a hyperloop, extremely expensive no doubt, and instead of those eight hours it may take you, say, four hours. Is that four hour gain really worth the effort? And remember: from home to destination there are the trips to and from the airport, or hyperloop station, so whichever means you use to travel, you use, lose a day for traveling from one side to the other side of the ocean anyway.
You have the wrong use-case. This is for medium-length journeys between cities separated by hundreds of miles, up to a thousand miles, not cross- or inter-continental journeys. LAX to SFO or SEA, not LHR to LGA. An airplane journey usually includes an hour or more of idle time in the airport, which itself is usually sited outside the city center. A Hyperloop system is intended to be faster than high-speed rail, but with a similar endpoint footprint.
It would be extremely challenging to build it under the Atlantic, approaching impossible with current tech. Atlantic goes up to 7 km in depth, so the pressure would be immense. Maybe if we invent gravitational force field one day.
@@jackwilson5542 Yes, that narrows it down to land travel, like the train for mid distance and the plane for long distance. I’m not sure such a hyperloop would be worth the effort and money, purely based on the gain in time, certainly when adding the to and from time to station / airport, as a hyperloop station will not be available within 20 kilometers for most travelers, and not providing a connection to every useful place to be, thus there is the need to change track a few times, with additional waiting time. My bet: a no go.
@@Markle2k first, the economics doesnt make sense...are you/thousands of ppl a day willing to over $5K a loop ticket for a SF-LA trip? then u also have safety and politics and of course, the science to overcome. This is a dumb conversation. We need light rail public transit transit, not grifting.
@@newagain9964 You are pulling numbers out of a dark and smelly place. And light rail does not serve inter-metro area distances. We have light rail in the Bay Area. If you extended it to LA, the trip would take 15 hours at the standard 25 mph top speed. And you would still have the same right-of-way issues as high-speed rail and hyperloop.
There's plenty of well-founded skeptism about hyperloops. Thunderf00t _et al_ have many videos on this. But I remember my own eyebrow raising moment when Musk said that the vehicle (in a near vacuum apparently), would be levitated _on an air bed._ Musk said, in an interview, "this isn't difficult!" Well, it begged the question, why pump air into a tube desperately trying to suck air out? Some time later when an audience member asked Musk what mechanism would actually be used, Musk hummed and bumbled around and eventually mumbled, "wheels".
Vactrains concepts are often about ramming a partial vacuum and creating themselves a localized cushion of air they can slip on. Think of it as a lube to avoid touching the side of the pipe while still being guided.
Thunderf00t has some "back of the napkin" calculations that make this idea an impractical pipe dream. I agree with Tim Thompson (below). Pulling a 99.9% vacuum in such a large space is the primary (and practically insurmountable) problem. We can accommodate mag-lev and design aerodynamics to allow for airflow etc...but pulling a vacuum in such a large area is a non-starter. The thing I didn't hear anyone talk about was the negative pressure model. where the back of the vehicle is at differential pressure from the front...like the bank tube example in Sabine's video. This is not a vacuum tube as proposed by Musk. Rather, it is a tube system where there is a pressure differential between the front and back of the tube. If the pressure in front of the vehicle is negative, you could (theoretically) reach the pretty high speeds (less than the speed of sound) without issue. It would be a complicated design but much less complicated than the vacuum tube model and fast enough for government work.
Was interesting hearing your take on it. I think it is directly irresponsible to spend money on the project since we have alternatives that are less dangerous, less costly and already works, like trains. It is hard enough to get governments to invest in public transportation when it is cost effective and it is sad to see when governments invest in some fantasy tech dream. Especially since it is not only expensive in terms of resources and effort to build, it is also costly to maintain. For the only two benefits of "very fast transportation" and "showing off tech" it seems quite wasteful I think. I also think that as technology improves regarding local high speed manufacturing and various digital remote presence solutions, the need for sending goods and people in extreme velocity will go down. Hopefully we will learn to just relax a bit, endure a bit longer transportation to conserve our precious planet and mental health. Anyway, thank you for great content as usual!
I agree on more trains. Then if we wan't to go fast air resistance increase roughly with the square of the speed so it quickly get less energy effiecient the faster we go. So I think we should invest something in research for hyperloop trains... Don't know how much or how much practical tests that should be done know.
Lately that model has become the norm: companies that no longer focus on providing a service or creating a product, but generating hype to get investor money, go public, pump up their stock with more hype, and finally sell before the scheme crashes down.
The vacuum can easily be held with a series of deflector shields inside the tunnel. Don't know why you'd go through all that trouble though when transporter bays are everywhere, ready to instantly beam you anywhere in the solar system for peanuts.
I suggest people do a YT search for "hyperloop debunked" or "hyperloop scam". Its probably time sensible channels like this one avoid the reputational damage from mentioning it.
My biggest issue here is the safety of the tube. Since no plan has been put forward that acurately adresses the safety concerns with vacuum breaches, the wave of air that travels at the speed of sound would literally pulverize anyone inside the entire tunnel. Yes that is what happens when you repressurize a system from a 99.9% vacuum, not to mention the sudden collaps of the structure onto itself. There are even some videos on youtube that shows this.
I love/support your videos, and I agree that there is nothing in the HyperLoop concept that is physically *impossible* but... as a theoretical physicist I think you underestimate the difficulty of maintaining a hard vacuum in such a large volume. The Large Hadron Collider requires a vacuum in a large volume, how long does it take to pump it down? Now imagine the LHC having to accommodate groups of tourists, who every few hours, wanted to crawl inside and look around.
@@TurinTuramber The "hard" or "high" or "ultra-high" vacuum is one which is not merely close to 0% atmospheric pressure. Depending on application, it means "when there is not enough air to have any chemical interaction with / contamination of materials in the chamber", "when there is not enough air to cause significant scattering of the accelerator beam", "when there is so few molecules, their mean free path is measured in kilometers", and such. It's much less than 0.1% of atmospheric pressure, sometimes the requirements go as low as one trillionth of atmospheric pressure.
@@denysvlasenko9175 I think my Dad said that their machines were measuring vacuum in many nines, where the level of vacuum was characterized by the exponent, not any petty measure like Pascals. He started working with accelerators and wound up in the semiconductor processing and epitaxy machine design.
Honestly this sounds like a transport system for Mars. As noted there are loads of issues but some are specific to Earth. You get the vacuum for free and tunnels are required since people would fry on the surface. My theory is that Musk wants to get as many of the engineering challenges and potential solutions discovered on Earth. And he's done it in a way that doesn't cost him much money. Another data point for Musk's Mars vision being a mole people Mars colony.
@@KevinLyda The capsule could provide the heating required. With the low atmosphere, you wouldn't need the tunnel at all. Also, the question is why you would even need fast travel to distant places on Mars. There's nothing out there except rocks and sand.
There's something so incredibly satisfying and relieving about someone that's so objective, logical, and factual about the world. Sometimes it feels like the world is drowning in bs/cults and ppl like you are the ones who talk some sense into the world.
"In summary, the Hyperloop isn't just hype, it may one day become a real alternative to airplanes." Sure, try and re-route the capsule or sending it across the waters, through or over mountains, over hills or down in depressions in the topical environment. It looks like to much of technical problems and technical limitations for me to put even a dime into such a project. Good luck University of Münich!
That was just the scientific exprssion of "That stuff will never work, but you can try prove me wrong." Or you cannot say there is *no* chance at all as long as there is a non-zero chance (however small) to pull it off.
@@Cau_No I didn't mean to say that there is no chance to fix the technical aspects of the project. I bet scientists can remedy the technical bit like for example the vibrations, given enough time. What I meant was that it's not worth the effort to make it work long distances. If you fix the technical problems, you will just end up with the difficulties of realizing the project. That should have been priority number one to figure out first, before diving into a stupid project like that. Why do you even want to realize such a project? There is not even any big environmental benefit to it. You just remove the engine from the vehicle and put it somewhere else, for crying out loud. The regular train is a much better solution. If one wants to move faster in a shorter amount of time you take the airplane. Traveling by jet airplane is a several times more environmental solution than taking the car, did you know that?
A 747 can weight over 800,000lbs. Go back to 1901 and tell people planes will weigh over a half million pounds, carry over 400 people, cruise at 40,000 feet, daily. We didn’t get here by deciding there too many technical limitations.
@@AveragePicker Actually, in the few steps to fix this "personnel tube" it is much easier to imagine that the problems involved with it will be solved. So that is not what I am saying either. I am saying that this future invention will not solve any existing environmental and/or gas shortage problems for mankind. And I am saying that there already exists good enough solutions for traveling at high speeds today.
When a hundred people propose a thousand idiotic ideas each, and one person's idea that was thought to be idiotic turns out to be wrong fifty or a hundred years later, does not mean the other 100,000 ideas weren't idiotic.
I started writing this and couldn't stop, I may have over thought it a little. The problems with hyperloops, after getting it to work that is, is you end up with 1) a single lane, 1 way, transport system, 2) that can only transport a very limited number of people at a time, 3) and you have to have sufficient braking distance between each carriage to allow for carriage break down or failure. It's not equivalent to a plane because each route has to have a tunnel built. (If each carriage can carry 30 people and Americans take a minimum 2 million flights per day, that's 66,666 carriages, per day, or just over 46 per minute. But it takes more than 1 minute to load a carriage with people, even if it didn't you would probably want a 1 minute gap between each departure for collision safety. So that's 46 hyper loops all operating constantly 24 hours per day, every day. You need a loop there and a separate one back,because a carriage will always be in transit going in one direction blocking the return journey, so that's 92 loops to construct, maintain, monitor and operate constantly). It's not a car because it doesn't go to where you want to go (So it won't replace car journeys) It's not a bus because it doesn't go short distances to near where you want to go. (So it won't replace bus journeys) It's closest equivalence is a train, but trains main benefit are for heavy, mass freight transport, which the hyperloop is not good for. However Americans make 7.2 million long distance train journeys per day, or to average it out 5000 journeys per minute, which is just over 166 carriages per minute. So that's another 166 hyperloops, 1 way, or 333 both ways. (So now it's 92 loops to replace air travel, 333 to replace long distance rail travel, so 425 loops) Planes don't make stops, but long distance trains do. A train stops at a station, then starts down the same track. If a train behind doesn't want to slow down the slower train has to be off the main line during its stop and then rejoin behind it and build up enough speed before the next train catches it. If each loop carriage needs a minimum 1 minute distance then in order for a carriage to rejoin the loop after stopping then every carriage further up the loop before the station has to slow down every time a carriage wants to rejoin, in order to re-establish the safe distance. Say you could have a fast long distance loop with no stops and a slower multi station loop for each route, that's now 850 loops. But in order for a carriage in the slow loop to be able to stop and rejoin the loop and still have a 1 minute safe distance from other carriages on the line without other carriages having to slow down, then actually each carriage needs a 3 minute safe distance, so you need twice as many loops on the slow loop system, so you actually need 1275 hyper loops, operating 24 hours per day. And that is for a system that has no redundancy at all and requires travellers to travel at a consistent rate 24 hours per day, which I suspect is not the case, and therefore does not meet customer requirements.
Because Musk knows it makes no economic sense even if they can solve the engineering problems. At the present time (Dec 2021) it looks like he might get out of SpaceX for similar reasons - the Starship project (and hence the Starlink project) is failing. Musk is no fool but he thinks everyone else is.
I read about "hyperloops" in the 90 in a science magazine, long before Musk was a known figure. He basically picked up an old idea and let other do the hard work, so he could take credit.
You are way off base. The electric car concept is over 100 years old yet no-one has had the vision to push it forward until Elon came along. The concept of returnable and reusable orbital class vehicles is also as old as science fiction, but until Elon came along no-one had made any progress. The concept of the hyperloop (as pointed out in the video) is alos over 100 years old (so that 1990s magazine was also not the originator) So what if he is not the original inventor - he is the one that has made these things become a reality.
@@poruatokin You realize that Tesla wasn't founded by Elon, right? Tesla was founded by other people why actually designed the Roadster. Elon strong armed his way into the company and pushed the founders out, then pretended the company was his creation.
Building a freeway takes 20 years of planning but a hyperloop can go underground which overcomes some of the major hurdles which keep high speed rail from even happening in the United States. We can either do invest in the future or let China take control.
I've worked it out ! simply make a train in the shape of a Boomerang, and throw it, and it will come back. Of course, getting off at your destination might pose a slight problem.
You have to leave something on the table for somone elses PhD. There may be a science one (i.e. complicated solution that maybe "works" on paper), and a philosophy one, arguing that you don't really need to get off at your destination at all.
Just wanted to give a well deserved shout-out to the editor(s); you're doing fantastic work! The orbiting Musk head sequence was a nice touch and made me chuckle. Edit: ...and Thank You to Sabine, of course! This channel is a 'hidden' gem that I share whenever possible. Your contributions are greatly appreciated.
Sabine, could you please talk about the safety issues? To my understanding, all it needs to sabotage it is to put a hole into the tube, and everything in it will be crushed. This would make it a primary target for attacks, as a powerful rifle could create such a hole, and also very sensitive to accidents, like vehicles crashing into a pillar. Or am I wrong?
The idea that it would implode has been debunked a long time ago. Thunderf00t got this part of it wrong but he was right as far as it not being a practical solution to travel.
Came here to say this is one of my favorite channels, Too many science channels are aiming to entertain ideas instead of explain the jargon, analogies and other details in a way that is understandable in common English. Sabine and "The Science Asylum" are the two channels I have found that do this consistently. Not to hate on other channels, its more a misunderstanding of the medium and what it takes to maintain a viewer base.
I agree with the sentiment that the whole notion of musk pushing the hyperloop was to curtail light rapid rail transportation in California. It would have been an impact on his electric car business.
Hello! The California Light Rail System began long before Elon Musk founded Tesla. To this day, not one mile of track for an actual system has ever been laid, and is now $9-billion dollars of tax dollars beyond development budget and 35-years late... ... at doing anything, Musk built Tesla with actual private money, was built under budget, and on time. Nobody is perfect, Elon Musk has his problems, but so far, his businesses are doing much better than efforts of the California Government.
@@kansascityshuffle8526 First, the notion of anybody’s portfolio having anything to do with a project funded by tax dollars is simply ludicrous. If the government wanted a rapid rail system, in truth, most of it would have been built before Elon Musk went into business(s). That collapses your entire argument.
@@kd7bwb12 ummm when you want to put tunnels under every major city full of the cars you made it becomes a little less ridiculous. Just that musk is a late detractor to the idea of lrt collapses nothing
@@kansascityshuffle8526 First, Elon Musk doesn’t say that, and doesn’t want put regular cars in tunnels. Even I have serious concerns about Hyperloop, and so far it doesn’t even work as a technology. It’s a train system moved by vacuum inside a tube. -- But even then, a private project by a private company (which has a history of successfully making launch-able rockets and building private electric cars), is infinitely better than spending $9-billion dollars stolen from taxpayers, in order to build a hi-speed light rail to exactly no-where. This boils down to private industry wins, socialist California government loses.
So, a fully realized hyperloop in a hard vacuum could potentially hit orbital velocities, but could you imagine the destruction if leakage or collapse caused a collision in a metro area at that speed?
Which is why Hyperloop isn't using a "hard vacuum". The low pressure would be similar to what high altitude planes fly in. Any transport system has the potential to fail catastrophically, but we design to avoid that.
In my layman's opinion, even if all the technical hurdels can be overcome, I still do not think that a hyperloop would be economically viable compared to flying in a metal tube 10-20 km above ground or a high-speed train. The vactrain needs an extensive infrastructure and the maintainence thereof to everwhere it is planned to go. A plane only needs the airstrip. But I don't think the technical problems can be solved to the point to even make the vactrain a possibel competitor in personal transportation in the first place. Even the idea of using the upcoming starship as an intercontinental passanger transport, as wacko as it is, is more realistic than the hyperloop, imo.
Using the starship as earth transport is more of a logistical nightmare then the Hyperloop. Look up Adam Something's video about the intercontinental starship he talks about how the pads would have to be offshore miles away from any city in the ocean and take a 45 minute ferry to get to the pad to begin with. I agree though, even if all the technical hurdles are met for vacuum trains where will the lines go and whom will such a system serve the most? I don't think every day people are going to get on a vac train it's most likely Elon just wanting a private shuttle wide enough for a pod for just himself and 2 friends to wiz past LA traffic in a private tube.
The Hyperloop is a great example of Elon Musk's godly powers of grifting. The idea is over 100 years old, he recycled it a bit, made some nice renders, and now everyone thinks it was his idea. And how nice of him to make this 100 years old idea he did not have open source!
How could he open source an idea that isn't closed, no one has the rights to it. Musk isn't even doing it, he's involved in many things but he's not involved in any Hyperloops atm. He threw an idea out and others ran with it, big deal he's not investing in it or receiving money for it, so how would that be a grift. If it is he's not very good at it seeing as several other companies and countries have invested millions into the idea. A small number of people have a really weird reaction to practically everything he does, on one side you have people who support everything he does or says, they will think the Hyperloop is an amazing idea, it's clearly a terrible idea and simply makes very little sense. Which is probably why Musk hasn't put money into it. Then you have the opposite group who foam at the mouth and call everything he does a "grift" without really understanding what that term means. Yes Hyperloop isn't a good or financially viable project. So what he was wrong he threw an idea out there. He wasn't wrong on landing rockets or electric cars. That's 2 pretty gigantic success's. He's probably the type that just has ideas all the time some will be good some will be bad. That doesn't make him a grifter lol
@@deepwinter77 how the hell is tesla worth 10x as much as than ford then? lmaoo he is such a grifter, and he can get away with it because he has a steve jobs'-esque "reality distortion field"
I remember being a young kid and imaging these trains levitating on magnets decades ago! So it's not exactly high level thinking. Once you grow up you realize why it's much more complicated, especially when it comes to accidents and safety precautions
I love your sense of humor, esp. toward British measurements! People like Musk, and governments love the idea of spending others' money on huge projects.
I love this channel. I am an entertainer. After my shows during my long drives is when I listen to this podcast the most. I find it all fascinating. Science is a wonderful thing! Thank you for making this channel!
The imperial and metric speed conversion nod to @MedCrisis floored me 🤣
I prefer the furlong-featherweight-fortnight system.
@@johnstonewall917 look, bushels, pecks and perches were good enough for my great grandfather, and there good enough for me. in a nutshell.
@@HarryNicNicholas A nutshell being 0,5 cc?
How many knots is that?
@@puma7171 What knots? Relative to what? There are many types of knots...
I worked as a semiconductor equipment technician on various vacuum systems in the first half of my career, and I really can’t understand how they’ll overcome the vacuum problem. How did trying to achieve 99.9% vacuum in a tube large enough to move 28 people in a “pod” even make it past a “back of the envelope” calculations, especially when the length of the tube is taken into consideration. It seems to me the energy required to achieve and maintain vacuum and cycle vacuum to atmosphere in load locks in such a system would be enormous.
It made it past the 'back of an envelope' because it was Elon Musk's envelope, and there are far too many people in the world who are some combination of ignorant, arrogant, and greedy.
I don't mean to sound harsh; I'm sure you were aware when you asked your question rhetorically. But since you asked it in public, I feel it needs to be answered, as often as possible.
They will never do. It´s a scam pulled up by politicians and some oil snake sellers.
Agreed, there's just no way to do this and make it a viable system. Pumping a vacuum that size will take forever, and once you have it you will need so many pumps to keep it up that you're basically spending all your money on pumps and the energy to run them. Then what happens where there's a hole in this tube? Anyone who's seen a catastrophic implosion of a large tank under vacuum will know how bad it will be. I could not want to be anywhere near that.
Build it in peaces you dont have to vacuüm the intire thing just the right places at the right time
@@jimmygeeraets9039 RoFL omfg!!!! Thank you for the laugh. I would love to see this put into practice. Now we are not just maintaining one gigantic vacuum we have an intermittent one that follows a pod moving 1000km/h around. The time to pump down individual legs of the tube would increase massively. Maintaining a vacuum is one thing pumping a tube from atmosphere down to close to zero is another. The amount of cost and energy required to do this on a on ongoing basis would be unworkable.
As a nuclear engineer, while I generally find myself imperceptibly nodding my head in agreement to most engineering-related topics you discuss in your channel, this is probably the first time I have my reservations. The problems of maintaining a vacuum in a system with such a large surface-to-volume ratio (which increases the chance for leakages) and with such a large overall volume (orders of magnitude larger than any vacuum system every built by mankind) are very, very, very challenging. How to build such a long, intricate, air-tight system with thousands of thermal expansion joints while having so many entry and exit points? How many pumps per km to maintain the vacuum? How much power consumption? While you mentioned some of these and more issues in the video, I think you did not stress their gravity sufficiently, if at all.
Now, indeed, there might be no inherent "physical" limitations to the Hyperloop concept as there might be in fusion (e.g. those magical structural materials, that will probably never exist, that can withstand irradiation by 14 MeV neutrons for more than a year before embrittling to utter failure, just to name one of a trillion issues), but that does not mean that the Hyperloop has the potential to result in an engineeringly-viable project (let alone an economically-viable one).
Nonetheless, keep up your exploratory, explanatory and educational work and videos, they are always welcome! Cheers from Serbia.
Not only do the many technological obstacles need to be overcome, it has to be done while keeping the entire tube laser beam straight. The train will be full of human beings don't forget and propelling human beings down an enclosed tube at 700 mph is a perfect recipe for a train full of vomit. There's a reason Elon Musk made the idea open source. He's a dreamer, but he's no dummy and he wasn't about to put any of his own money into it.
yes, I don't think Hyperloop will ever be a reallity. I mean I can't be 100% sure when it comes to centuries or millenia into the future but:
You have a lot of very big problems that make it look like other forms of transportation are simply easier and cheaper no matter what we invent in the future. The long vacuum tubes in themselves are impossible with current tecnology. The heat expansion, Heat transfer and condensation problems, losses etc.
In addition for most "train" connections these super high speeds aren't achievable anyway because you can't accelerate the people inside at 20g. IF it ever becomes a reallity, it would need to be over really long distances like New York - Paris or longer, it would need to be at least similarely safe as Airplane travel and I reaaaaally don't think they will EVER get there, and it must compete against just going higher in the atmosphere. Nobody hinders us from putting additional rocket boosters to an airplane, let the normal engines take them to mach 0.8 and 15km of height, than let the rocket engines take over and take the Airplane to 50-100km of height (yay, suborbital space flight...) and like mach 7 or something. It's not much "longer" a way because on those large distances, going 50km up and down doesn't add to much extra "way" to be covered, it has the same problems with protecting against vacuum but doesn't have the problems that the vehicle compresses the air in the tube that much, so less efective air pressure at the same nominal air pressure, doesn't need expensive and currently impossible infrastructure along the whole way, in most accident scenarios it can be safed by just gliding it down to the ground while in such a tube most accident scenarios lead to a rapid decompression of the tube and unavoidable 100% fatality for all trains in the tube, airplanes are much less vulnerable to terrorists (ever shot a hyperloop tube with a gun? with the current designs it doesn't even need to be a strong gun but if they thicken the steel, well, an Anzio 50mm is free to buy in the US afaik).
Even something like the starship from SpaceX is much more realistic for point to point travel on earth than a hyperloop and even this is technology that is at least a few decades from being viable and at least like half a century from being profitable.
Hyperloop sounds good at first glance but it really isn't
I work with electron microscopes. We struggle to keep a 1 mm diameter, 2 meter tube at >95% vacuum. You can do it (and exceed it), obviously, but it ain't free and it always has problems.
Well said!
Just the amount of money the vacuum pumps will consume in energy will be difficult to justify, which will need to come from tickets. Maybe it will be cheaper to have supersonic planes flying at 90km above ground.
Just build some trains, please!
NO
But those are too slow for billionaires.
But train stations don't have disco lights and Tesla cars driving in narrow tunnels!
You know trains aren't the pinnacle of technology, right?
Indeed
As *Adam Something* on youtube pointed out about the hyperloop. Even if we overcame the technical challenges. There is very little reason to build one atm from infrastructure and a logistics perspective. As in almost all cases, pure speed isn't itself what makes a transportation system great, it's the volume it can transport every hour/day/week/month etc. And even the most optimistic estimate on the hyperloop concept has lower volume capacity then rail trains and subway systems like in London.
ofc you might be able to fins a market where speed is much more important, I can imagin that ultra premium system that would almost replace private jets might be viable, but that isn't mass transportation like the London metro.
The thing with privet jets is: sure, they use the same airports as regular jets, but you don't need to have infrastructure on the ground on the scale of streets or rails.
The one use i can see is for industry in bum-f-nowhere... IF the hyperloop becomes viable at one point then nobody would care that much if heavy industries make use of it.
I wouldn't bet on it, not even at rate of 1 : 10, but who knows what future tech makes possible.
well subway systems generally only have a short trips (2-3 min between stops), so supersonic speed wouldn't be usefull (especially cause it takes a while to accelerate), same goes for regional trains. The only use case I see for super/hypersonic trains is ultra long distance pasanger transportation over land, such as going from capetown to cairo or Madrid to Moskau with only a couple stops in between. Where even regular maglev trains would take a while to get you where your going, but there also isnt a ocian in the way.
+
Yes after watching Adam something's video a while ago i was surprised Sabine wasn't as critical. Maybe this is the difference between being a physicist and being an engineer. You need an engineer sometimes to explain how your idea isn't as wonderful as you thought it was
@@dessertstorm7476 more like science communicator vs. reactionary clickbate generator.
Actually looking at real proposals that are being developed vs. hyperfocusing on Elon Musk to farm content for edgy teens.
A system like the hyper loop (more precisely magnetic levitation trains in tunnels with partial vacuum) has been studied in Switzerland since 1974. The aim of the project 'Swissmetro' was to connect the main Swiss cities, which are about 100 km apart, by 15 min. connections (the trains would run at 600 km/h max. speed). It turned out that the costs are not really worth it and that a fast city-to-city connection is worthless without a integrated transportation system. What good is a 600 km/h train if you need 45 min. for the last 10 km of your trip by bus? Today the system is optimized for a 1h city to city connections every 30 min. So no matter where you are in a major Swiss city, you know that at the full hour and at the half hour you will have a fast connection to any other major city. And from there all the local transport is synchronized too. You walk off the train and onto the bus, which will then depart in a few minutes. This has made time tables basically obsolete. The challenge of Swiss public transportation today is not speed but capacity. It is planed to have the integrated city-to-city connections every 15 min.
Cool!
"What good is a 600 km/h train if you need 45 min. for the last 10 km of your trip by bus?" That makes a lot of sense! I guess then that such high speed transport would be a lot more useful in much longer distances (such as the US or China). But then you face the issue of cost to build and maintain thousands of kms of infrastructure, something that at least for the hyperloop concept would be impossible.
They’ve talking about these systems since 1800s. They’re unfeasible. We need public rail systems, FFS.
@@newagain9964 Good public rail, tram networks (probably the best inner and inter-city transport option, period), bus schedules that coincide with other modes of transportation, even a monorail in severely congested cities where tunneling isn't an option and where layout replanning has been made unfeasible (cough, LA), and most certainly looking into other modes of transport that could move large volumes of people. (Even airships are infinitely better than these hypothetical 'ultra-fast' solutions)
Capacity, reliability, and safety are paramount.
Trams, Trains, Buses. Still the kings.
@@Unethical.FandubsGames never gonna happen tho (in US). Ppl vote against their best interest simply to maximize selfishness and maintain class-based mentality and structures.
Woah woah wait a second I was on board with the mockery of Imperial units until I realised the British are the butt of the joke. Is this how it feels?! I am sorry Americans, I had no idea I had been so cruel!
Fancy seeing you here... I enjoy watching your channel, keep up the good work :)
@@kensho123456
Actually, you can put 2 pints in a quart pot…
@Medlife Crisis
Not to worry. After 4 years or trump, we’re used to being mocked on a regular basis!
At lease a British man (Watt) invented the metric system and we've now dropped the imperial system completely in science, maths and engineering.
It's just old people who want to keep miles and gallons so they know how many miles per gallon their car does when they're buying petrol by the litre
Ironically, we usually refer to the amount of crap we've had to put up with using an SI unit, the metric shit-tonne.
"Using the well known rich man's recipe: let others do the work for free." Well said.
All of Elon Musk's ideas are intended for use on Mars one day. He was intending on building a small tunnel on Chicago I believe, with shuttle cars. I'm not sure what happened with those plans. I heard these proof of concept have something to do with agreements of intellectual property and the company.
Except he doesnt do that at all, its really not well said.
@@blakhhh You're right, he just finances engineers and scientists to do it. A capitalist CEO, nothing new to see except the cult-ish following he has.
@@ixussa "I'm not sure what happened with those plans." - Erm... Office 'Bonfire Night'?
@@ixussa Living on Mars would have many more downsides than just living on and taking care of our current planet.
The technique Musk used to determine the target speed of the Hypeloop is termed pikitoutayabutt. 1000 kph is the speed needed to justify the project, so that's the speed on the view-graph. And that's the number that is uncritically reported as if it were an intrinsic property of things in tubes.
No such thing will occur. Certainly not at a commercially viable price point. By the time there might be technology to make such a thing at all (as a performance art project?), that same technology will have cut the price of far more boring competitors. It is already clear that we can get wheels on steel trains up to about half that speed. Sure you'll pay 4x to cut a trip from 8 hours to 2. But you ain't gonna pay that to cut one from 3 hours to 1.5. And by that time what you'll be paying 4x for is a jet that barely gives you time to take your shoes off.
Of course by that time some Meta-Musk will be pitching the Meta-hyperloop which moves so fast that it delivers you to your destination before you board. But also by that time, we will have conventional old time machines that can do the job for half the price.
Sir, why ar you picking on Elon when Vigin is already doing it too ? I heard Bezos wants a pie
@@granand Musk and Bezos are in a dick measuring competition, I'd rather they spend their own money in that instead of my taxes.
Next time try to write "km/h" if yo're thinking about speed, and not about kangaroos punching horses (kph).
@@granand virgin made a 1 km track. just had a modified airplane cockpit body put on wheels .. it went 100mph.. like normal trains do...then soon after virgin let go of half the emplyees.and not branson is planning to sell it off so virgin doesnt have to put enymore money in this bottomless pit
The biggeset takeaway I got from all Thunderf00t's videos about the hyperloop is the catastrophe that would happen if the hyperloop's vacuum were broken. All it takes is one leak along the entire length of the track and suddenly you have a wall of air coming at you at 761 mph. (5 times faster than a category 5 hurricane!) The entire line would have to be constantly maintained by specialist engineers, and patrolled by security to make sure it wasn't vandalized or terrorized.
Oh, and by the way - everything you mentioned regarding sabotage is already applicable to aircraft and trains - so nothing new there.
@@poruatokin Applicable, but it is far easier to catastrophically sabotage hyperloop than planes or trains. Security only needs to be placed at terminals for air travel, because it's very difficult to vandalise or terrorize a plane without being on board and already going through security. Trains are on the ground, yes, so it's easier to sabotage without being on board, but a single bullet isn't going to derail a train. It will take longer to damage the tracks enough, which allows security cameras to give precious time to the drivers to emergency stop. And even if a high speed train derails and falls from a viaduct, like happened in the Wenzhou train collision in China in 2011, almost 80% of the passengers survived. No one in the pod would survive a single bullet breaching the hyperloop; no one in the entire pipe from end to end would survive.
@@jamesrockybullin5250 I'd question your assertion, so would the victims of 9/11. And, it would be very easy for someone of that mind to park themselves at the end of an airport runway (outside of security) with a suitable weapon to take pot-shots at aircraft taking off, filled with thousands of kilograms of highly inflammable fuel and lumbering into the sky it would not be difficult to create a disaster.
But, if you live in a country of gun toting terrorists and that possibility is your major issue with this potential technology then I'd suggest that finding a high speed, environmentally friendly transport solution is not the biggest problem that needs to be solved in your society.
But I thought the topic of the video was the engineering feasibility of hyperloop, not gun culture.
@@poruatokin If you are seriously suggesting that a hyperloop and conventional trains and plains are at anything like an equivalent level of risk then you either don't know what you are talking about or you are a hyperloop fanboy who refuses to listen to criticisms of what is currently at least a spectacularly impractical concept.
Maintaining even low pressure in a long tube would be breathtakingly energy expensive. Its not remotely eco-friendly.
Maybe, and I can't emphasise the "maybe" strongly enough; it might become practical in the future.
Thunderf00t's physics sucks. His ball bearing model does not scale to human size, due to the changing ratio of surface area to volume. Also, a pressure wave from any breach would quickly disperse in the vacuum, leaving a gradient of increasing air pressure, and a breach would not cause a structural collapse of any part of the tube, the forces involved in maintaining a tube at vacuum are not that large relative to the strength of a steel tube a few meters across.
No Sabine, the primary problem isn't financial, though that one's nigh insurmountable as well, it's absolutely safety. After an emergency stop has been initiated and assuming the passengers can survive 10g of deceleration (probably way too much; remember the break will push them against their seat belts, not the seat) and assuming the speed was only barely the speed of sound, it'd still be several hundreds of meters before the capsule would come to a stop.
Any dynamics engineer worth his salt can calculate the vibrations from this system. Studies aren't really needed for that, and installing dampers can reduce vibrations. Putting the system on piles therefore isn't a particularly large problem because of that. Localised stresses from a variety of causes however are, and especially thermal expansion, and the huge amount of energy needed to be put into constantly pumping air out. A tube that doesn't have much of a vacuum will actually increase the aerodynamic resistance for the reason that air will have a harder time going around the capsule, and overpressure at the front and underpressure at the back will increase.
Add to that the fact the absolutely nightmarish circumstances one will have to deal with for maintenance. The inner parts will be practically inaccessible unless the vacuum is disbanded, in which case, congrats, the air now needs to be pumped out again, and good luck finding any tiny hole that can completely ruin the fun. Because of thermal expansion many joints and components would have to have space to expand and move around, as day and night cycle alone would lead to elongated tube lengths and diameters. Uneven distribution of the heat at the top (because of sun, rain and snow) would further induce complex localised stresses. Add to that the robustness needed so that the whole thing doesn't get shredded if a local complete catastrophic failure occurs (like a terrorist detonating a bomb ripping a huge hole in part of the tube), because otherwise everyone in that tube at that time will die.
I can go on and on, but the facts of the matter which you basically acknowledge, is that there's too little benefit for this idea for it to be worth the absolutely massive expenses needed to design, build and maintain it. The idea has existed since the late 19th or early 20th century by the way, and this is the precise reason why planes exist and this thing does not and probably never will. This cannot be stressed enough.
Elon Musk is a snake oil peddler and little more. Every cent spent on this is a cent not only wasted but also lost to improving the public transport (and hypersonic rail) we so desperately need.
TL;DR: This will NOT become a viable alternative in 2 or 3 decades either!
Snake oil peddler indeed! Another description might be vaporware salesman.
That's one less Xmas card to open :)
I’m pretty sure he only came up with the idea to sabotage the Californian high speed rail project. He didn’t want that to go ahead because, unlike most of his ideas that seem to come down to selling more Teslas, this would have reduced the need for Teslas.
I think the name Hyperloop was a pretty ballsy troll, because he couldn’t fail to have noticed you only need to remove the “r” to end up with hype loop.
Glad to find other reasonable humans that do not fall for the "sigma male" bullshit and stupid worship for Musk. That guy is doing a lot of damage. It's very sad.
I think the vacuum problem alone is economically insurmountable. Achieving such large vacuum systems, is harder than most appreciate and incredibly energy intensive much less maintaining such vacuums over time. What is more, isolated loss of vacuum integrity in the system brings the risk of system-wide catastrophic failure.
We may very well see the implementation of “trolleys in tubes” or high-speed subways” perhaps even “high-speed maglev subways” but I sincerely doubt they will run in vacuums as proposed.
Instead of even trying to vacuum, what are the limits of accelerating all the air in the tube (and along with it the caddy) like in the old office postal systems? I guess the air starts to friction at the tube but suppose you would accelerate the air to 1/2 mach and go another 2/3 mach relativ to the air with the vessel, one could achieve faster than sound travel without the vessel itself actually breaking the sound barrier, not?
Just run the exhaust tube to space. Free vacuum. You're welcome, I'll take my royalty checks weekly thanks
@@frp1276 Earth's gravity will keep the air in, just like it does with atmosphere..
High speed trains in tubes is definitely where we are going to go. Hyper loop style systems may exist, but they'll exist for military applications or the ultra rich. Don't have to worry about most of the problems if it's just a couple pods a day of super rich fucks.
@@akshayisr thanks chief, it wasn't a serious proposal
In Chemical-Engineering/Synthesis, I've met people with excellent qualifications from first rank Universities but who don't have a practical bone in their bodies.
The Hyperloop is primarily a great tool to use at engineering/science job interviews. Anyone who thought it to be practicable in the real world, is someone who shouldn't get the job.
Just curious, do you think Elon Musk has a practical bone in his body? Would you want him in your company? Considering one of his companies is the leading electric vehicle producer and the other is the largest commercial launch provider?
@@nikolatasev4948 Musk was an early investor in PayPal, not the founder, though he did sue in order to call himself "a founder"of PayPal. Likewise, Tesla was not founded by Musk, it was funded by Musk, the founder is elsewhere now. Tesla is absurdly overpriced, and a drop of 50% in its stock price would wipe out Musk altogether, due to leverage. The jury is still out on Space X, but I would like 1. to see him fly in his one of his own rockets and 2. explain what greater good is achieved by his firm if what it does amounts to very short extremely high-emissions joyrides for billionaires. Plus, now there's a new weird problem: there are TOO many satellites in space already, and hi-speed debris-generating collisions are expected to grow exponentially in the immediate future.
@@MegaMaxiepad Tesla was directly led by Musk for the majority of their rise, the original founder did not stick for long. Musk turned Tesla in what it now is - a massively profitable, and growing automaker. Musk owns a very large part of it. Even if the stock fell 60% he would still own a large part of a massive company. He is in a lot of debt, compared to you and me, but I don't think he is ~50 Billion in debt. If you have better sources - feel free to share them.
SpaceX in not making their money from joyrides for billionaires. They had one such mission, and dozens of commercial satellites, plus many missions for the US government carrying satellites, cargo and people to the ISS. Each flight saves tens of millions of taxpayer dollars over what ULA or Russia would have charged for the same thing.
I have no idea why you would wait for Musk to fly his own rocket, neither ULA nor the Chinese, Indian, Russian or European leaders have flown their own rockets. They have been very successful on the commercial market before Musk outcompeted them. Why the double standard on what makes a successful company?
You may not like the side effects of the companies, but this is not my point. I asked if Musk had a practical bone in his body. His products dive and fly in the real world, and are outcompeting anything else in their direct market, so I think he does.
@@nikolatasev4948 Tesla has benefitted from massive govt subsidies to electric cars, a non-stop supply of hype and stunts (hyperloop, self-driving cars, trips to Mars) and an army of fanbois, while the cars themselves suffer from quality issues (Musk himself admits it). Standard rocket technology was developed over many decades, and many lives were lost. The much hyped US Space Shuttle was a bust in hindsight (two out of five exploded), and I insist, the jury is still out on Space X. And Tesla is simply not worth more than ALL car manufacturers in the world combined selling only 1% of all cars in the world. The scam was so appealing that a competing charlatan launched his own Tesla knock-off, the fully-fraudulent NIkola. And really, electric car tech is very old (about as old as the idea of a hyperloop), nothing truly revolutionary about it. And Musk's endorsement of bitcoin via Tesla, only to withdraw it a year later when it looked like it was time to cash out, reflects terribly on the guy. Again, he sued PayPal so that he could continue to call himself a founder? Does that sound like an honest thing to do?
@@nikolatasev4948 Nikola, that depends on how much he wanted me to pay him to be in my company. I would have in the marketing department, for sure. But not in any technical or manufacturing department.
I believe from a hypothetical standpoint the hyperloop is interesting. From a realistic standpoint it will be ultimately abandoned. It is an engineering nightmare, extremely complex to build and maintain and far to expensive.
It's possible , why ?
Material engineering of
Smart self repairing and self adjusting materials.
Remember these are engineering problems not scientific ,someone will find a way
There is demand so there will be money
@@cedriceric9730 i think you need to understand that an engineering problem is the biggest obstacle to your theoretical models of it working
@@cedriceric9730 Engineering is built upon scientific principles 🤦🏻♂️ Maybe in a fantasy world of self healing metal and magic the hyperloop can exist. In the real world, it’s a engineering nightmare.
Pretty much sums it up man.
@@cedriceric9730 Please stop writing like that
"Hype going around in a loop" is my takeaway. Sure in a few decades with advancements in superconductors, maglevs in tunnels with reduced pressure may become feasible but at that point there's no reason to call them hyperloop since "train in vacuum" is an old idea.
I was hoping that hyperloop hype would at least kick off some significant innovations in large scale vacuum systems but so far nothing groundbreaking seems to be brewing.
oh noo these are PODS in vacuum ToooooooooTALLY different, the number of idiots in this world is rising exponentially. Anyone who had ever dealt with vacuum tubes will tell you how difficult it is to pull air from a small chamber and keep it for prolonged periods of time, let alone the tube that will be several kilometres long.
I would bet that even without Hyperloop there already were a lot of use cases for a large scale vacuum chambers. Therefore if there were any low / medium hanging fruits to collect, somebody would have done it by now. For instance aren't all the particle accelerators circular vacuum tubes?
I highly doubt that it will ever be easier and more efficient to build and maintain vaccuum tunnels than to just design trains to minimise drag.
@@SimonWoodburyForget Feel free to pour your life's equity into it pal. That's capitalism right there. You are free to assume as much risk as you want for whatever payoff you want; cash, the enviro, SJW cred with your hipster friends at Starbucks etc.
@@julkiewitz The inner diameter of LHC(Large Hadron Collider) vacuum tube is some 50 mm, the inner diameter of Tesla hyperloop test tube is 3200 mm, just some 64 times larger than LHC vacuum tube, and ones in presentations are even larger, this is not to mention metal expansion, contamination, security issues....etc
Thunderf00t did an in depth review and concluded that the technical issues were extreme, and it was easy to sabotage.
Yes, just drill a tiny hole anywhere, or two.
exactly, we never went to the moon, confirmed by thunderfoot
@@Sindrijo Same can be said of airplanes 🤣
Thunderf00t has lost his credibility on anything Musk related. I do think his arguments against the hyperloop video were pretty good, though.
@@MiguelRuiz-vp1hu Hes even wrong about that , hyperloops are coming
This means one thing , those problems have been solved or engineers have 100% evidence they aren't actual problems
Maglev doesn't strictly require superconducting magnets (though we do finally have some decent ones now with ReBCO tape). The Inductrack-type maglev has strong advantages, including failsafe-at-speed operation and cheaper construction costs.
I love your humour Sabine. Perfectly dead pan!
More importantly, thank you for explaining the system in a more technical, and less sensational way than other introductions to the concept. Yet also being quite clear about the potential benefits, pitfalls and dangers.
th-cam.com/users/Thunderf00tsearch?query=hyper
1.4 x 10^9 hands per fortnight if you're british.
Laughed more during Sabine explaining the physics challenges to a hyperloop than during some standup comedy specials.
I watch every episode for the fashion and clothing
I see more problems, mainly that even at such high speeds, the small scale these things need to have if you want to go anywhere not in a 100% perfectly straight line (for which I can guarantee there will be no construction permission in 500 years from how many people go to court) makes them incredibly inefficient compared to existing rail systems, that can in total transport more passengers in the same time frame due to the distance you'd have to keep between pods for effective and safe braking maneuvers, and capacity is essential in high speed transport too.
Then how do you design switchover points? There aren't gonna be arbitrary alternative routes in case of technical failures like a major leak in the tunnel, which would require you to close it off to maintain the vacuum and reroute pods onto non-existing alternative lines, aka you hold up all of the traffic until somebody bothers to drive out there and fix up the tunnel.
The thing is, we have the technology for high speed rail and it's constantly improving. It's cheaper in comparison and far less sensitive and therefore technical failures have more manageable consequences. Trains can easily be rerouted onto old lines or side tracks, evacuation is much easier, the capacity higher and it still gets you to places at a decent enough speed. Especially high speed freight trains have lots of unused potential and some major countries plan to increase their cargo rail traffic for more than just environmental reasons.
The way I see it, hyperloops are Gadgetbahns (for an explanation of this, see the explanation video on the RM Transit channel, though Germans can probably guess the meaning). It's fancy tech to show off with major practicality issues and unnecessary challenges (as per Virgin Hyperloop diagram) that can simply be avoided if people stopped beating around the bush, stopped being Elon Musk simps and simply built more high speed rail.
Indeed. Mass transit has been a solved problem for a century, tramways and busses work great especially with modern tech.
People like Musk create more problems than they solve, their lobbying is screwing up our urban planning.
@@TheStephaneAdam especially his car tunnel with pods. It takes less space to just have the cars drive themselves or, you know, build a metro. Or his car tunnel that is a one lane tunnel without emergency exits to escape his exploding cars and has fancy rainbow lighting. It's all just so incredibly useless!
The most economical way to reduce air pressure and resistance for travel is flying to 40,000 ft.
I also don't think any high speed rail is being delayed or cancelled because of Elon Musk one he isn't involved in any of the companies trying to do Hyperloops and hasn't put any money into any of them nor does he intend to as far as I've read.
He threw out an idea, a bad one granted but I have plenty of bad ideas as do we all.
@@TheStephaneAdam Our urban planning are you talking about where you live or the general our.
Because I find it pretty amazing that he has managed to screw up urban planning in general when he doesn't even have a stake in any of the Hyperloop companies atm. Urban planning and public transport is planned on the decades time frame and depending on scale can take 5 to 10 years per project.
Maybe you were being hyperbolic?
@@deepwinter77 The hyperloop was proposed at the same time as California announced it was starting a high speed rail project. There were delibrate comparisons made to convince people that the hyperloop would be a better investment due to superior speeds.
Elon Musk owns a car company, those firms benefit immensely from under investment in public transit.
Being in a vacuum the capsules would need life support systems similar to a spaceship
with the added constraint of the tunnel walls preventing cooling by passive radiation of
any internally generated heat.
Yeah that would as stupid as high altitude passenger travel where the air is too thin and cold to breath.
... wait a minute !
@@Vaasref what is the amount of energy needed to evacuate the air from the atmosphere of Earth at 100,000ft? Will this cause the Earth to implode and destroy the aircraft? The answers are ZERO and NO.
You could use a heat pump to radiate heat at significantly above the ambient temperature of the tube walls, which would then quite readily absorb it.
It's a lot of extra effort on top of something that's already a lot of extra effort though.
Most of the prototypes have had onboard heat sinks, E.G blocks of ice, which also doesn't strike me as very practical for mass transit.
@@lazarus2691 to heck with ice, fill the tubes with water. Turn the pods into mini subs. Use water pressure to propel them.
@@MrTaxiRob What! absolutely not , lol
But water is very good at handling heat
It can also be used to maintain the vaccum
The "train in a vacuum tube" concept has been around for over 200 years, and hasn't been realized yet. People like to joke about fusion power being perpetually "only 20 years away". But the vacuum train is even worse!
Fusion was only 30 years away last time the joke was said so maybe we're getting closer!!
EXACTLY, michael backtree!
@@minerscale Plus, HUGE DIFFERENCE: HUMANS HAVE ABSOLUTELY MADE PROGRESS IN FUSION OVER THE PAST 100 YEARS! BUT ZERO progress has been made with the problems of this Hyperloop BULLSHIT!
Elon Musk is a grifter
@@minerscale Well the last time the prediction of fusion was actually shifted to less than 20 years. Still worthy of the joke but there have been several serious breakthroughs on that subject... and none on vacuum trains. (Precisely what Mr. Ultimate Reductionist said)
Passengers would also need CO2 scrubbers to be able to breath as the Hyperloop pod would be in the same environment as spacecrafts. Also, what if the tube would break, causing a front of air invading it and smashing at that speed as concrete against the capsule? What if the capsule would loose integrity causing instant death to the passengers due to suffocation and causing the Bends? What about the minimum safe distance between different capsules which will effect Hyperloop's passengers per hour transport capability compared to the high capability of a high speed train?
Also, If you are in a pressurized pod while outside there is near vacuum, in the case of significant loss of hull integrity the pod would depressurize instantly and the lungs of the people on board would burst killing them instantly. No sort of mechanical intervention to re-pressurize the tube would act fast enough to prevent this. And so on and so on...
There is also the problem of cooling the motors too.
A grain of sand would interrupt any seal.
Easily solved by small print on the ticket
They are ignoring the G forces on the passengers at those speeds. The passengers would have to wear space suits.
@@dogwalker666 what do space suits do for G forces?
When I was three years old, I hypothesized that if your car was just longer, say like ten miles or even one hundred miles long, you could just walk from the back of the car to the front to get to your destination. That should be pretty fast as it takes hardly anytime to go from the back to the front of your car.
Then I grew up and turned 3 and half.
Elon Musk is gonna steal your idea now
I worked in the 80s at a company that sold low pressure plasma systems to deposit protective coatings on jet engine airfoils, doing industrial automation. I'm going to use torr as that was the unit we used back then; torr is mm of mercury. Atmospheric is about 760 torr, or something like 640 torr at high altitudes. The vacuum chamber was about the size of an SUV with preheat transfer chambers about 3' long and 1.5' in diameter. Parts would be loaded into the transfer/preheat chamber, air pumped out, and after preheat, an inter-chamber gate was opened for the part to enter the main chamber.
One thing I remember was that it was a bitch keeping all the seals in good enough condition in order to get down to 20 torr.
100 pascal is 0.75torr. I can not imagine how maintaining a tunnel hundreds of miles long, or even a single mile is possible.
I've ridden the AVE in Spain (310kph / 193 mph). A reasonably priced very smooth quiet ride and thrilling to see the countryside zip by so fast. I can't even begin to imagine the cost of building and maintaining vacuum tubes over those distances. How much time do you lose by having to cycle through airlocks? What does a catastrophic failure of a several hundred mile vacuum tube look like?
Messy, and the clean up crew would need trauma therapy after the job. There was a saturation diving accident with an explosive decompression of a pressure chamber. one guy literally exploded, 2 boiled instantly, and the guy who opened the hatch lost his arm, died too. In a hyperloop, you would most likely be pulled through a leak like in an Airplane at the edge of the stratosphere, and whatever pieces are too big, ground along the walls until you are a smear, i doubt there would be more left than something, you clean with a waterhose. Maybe a tooth or so spread over hundreds of meters.
@@Gunni1972 i dont think you'd get sucked through a hole in the pod. At least not a small hole. After all the pressure difference is at most 1 bar, so the force is about 1 kg/cm2. So in that way it will not be as bad as the accident you mentioned. As long as the hole is no larger than a coin, I guess you could just put your hand over it. However! If the tube breaks, you have a problem. If you are going towards the place where it is broken, your pod will be met with a wall of air that's coming towards you. I'm not sure how violent the braking will be, but I'm guessing it won't be fun. And if the tube breaks behind you, the air that rushes in will accelerate the pod uncontrollably. The Mythbusters once made a ping pong ball go faster than the speed of sound by putting it in a vacuum tube and opening the tube in one end. I guess more or less the same would happen in the hyperloop. It would be a mess for sure. I think the whole concept is nonsense. How would one evacuate someone that is stuck in a pod in a vacuum tube?
The difference is in the power consumed to maintain speed. At top speed a train is using virtually 100% of its rated power to punch a hole through the air.
Hypeloop is not a replacement idea for trains - it is a replacement for airliners.
Yes vft are great, I have ridden the Maglev between Pudong and Shanghai several times. It runs regularly at 420 kmh. Very impressive but not as smooth as wheeled vfts like Eurostar.
@@jimgraham6722 The reason why the German built Pudong Maglev is not smooth is because it was built in a hurry over marshland as a political prestige project.
I rode it shortly after it was built many years ago during very windy conditions but it was surprisingly smooth then....but that was before it starting sinking.
Sabine, I died laughing at your joke that passengers might be fine with dying from the vacuum as long as they are comfortable! Thank you
Yes please, have a nice AC/heater in the capsule, people can play around with, while railing on supercooled tracks. Energy efficiency looks diffrent.
Were you comfortable when you died?
Basically if you fly an airplane and it suffers a mid-air disintegration at 12 km altitude, you will die comparably to potentially dying in a leaky hyperloop capsule.
Who says ze Germans don't have a sense of humour?
I LOL'd when she asked if its called hyperloop because it is nonstop hype going around in a loop? Actually that is the perfect description for it! :D
I would say there is too much hype around hyperloop technology. It gets too much attention for having no good practical examples, it distracts from things like trains which are pretty fast these days and have significantly higher capacity/bandwidth than any hyperloop proposal I've seen, and can be made significantly more comfortable and safe. Moving away from cars, even electric (huge energy cost and waste generation in production) is going to be an important step for us as a society to address climate issues, as well as make travel something more accessible to those who are less well off. We need to exploit our current technology to the fullest before we dream about implementing things like hyperloop.
I'm not saying engineers and futurists are bad people if they want to think about hyperloop. But nations and cities should not be investing in it, their attention should be on implementing the practical and proven.
Thankfully humanity as a whole does not think like you or we’d still be using horse and cart
In order to build a TGV Alstom railway, geography and demographics aren't the biggest friends of your main ideas.
You cannot combine transportations of goods thanks to trains with bullet trains in order to reduce fuel consumption. You won't have enough railway tracks. The moment you'll start to break down the problem, the network would not allow you to do whatever you think is the best. It's an illusion of choice.
The hype is not about Hyperloop. It's all about Elon the hype king Musk, who I'll say is rather the Donald Trump of the tech. Sector.
Well said!
Hyperloop is literally "dreams in a pipe" - they're called pipe dreams for a reason! LOL!
Public transport isn’t as great for climate. Busses aren’t much better than passengers driving in gas cars, and much worse than driving in electric cars. Trains are better but still about the same as EVs. Future EVs will be smaller and more efficient so they’ll have even smaller carbon footprints.
Thank you for taking the time to lay this all out for us mere mortals. Looks like this concept is just hyper hype.
Well it's a sermon of the church of Musk.
@@llothar68 May his fully autonomous, self driving cars deliver us unto the store for smokes an not run over a bicyclist on its right or the central median. Amen.🙏
Hurray, the Imortal Geniuses arrived to save humanity. 😂😂
Did you watch the Video or not?
I suggest the levitated hyper network. You lift the passenger compartments to a high altitude in the atmosphere. There a natural 2.5 dimensional surface / volume of low pressure exists for extended travel at low pressure. The compartments can travel from any start point to any end point without a point to point tube, allowing for flexible reroutings for changing demands. Chances in speed or direction will hardly be felt by the passenger because the trajectory of the compartment will adapt dynamically and automatically. The compartments will be suspended by attached airfoils and propelled by internal combustion engines or jet engines. You are welcome.
Ah yes, aeroplanes.
@@SwampCityRadio1974 Oh, an aeroplane. Oh, I say, we are grand, aren't we? Oh, oh, no more buttered scones for me, mater. I'm off to play the grand piano.
This way, you can send a letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail - and still catch the 4:30 auto-gyro.
It will never work, he says drinking from a Concorde coffee mug.
That would never work are you on drugs
It's quite literally a pipe dream. You need only one small hole in the tube to have air rushing in, ripping the tube apart and traveling as a shock-wave inside it...
bringing all of the problems of air travel down to the ground. thats the essense of hyperloop. its an absolute fantasy
Thats wrong, look into the physics of compressible fluids. Especially critical flow of gasses. The air rushing in is limited by the size of the hole, as its flow velocity through can't excess the speed of sound. As a reference: the ISS had multiple holes.
Yes, people have to feel comfortable before dying in any high velocity transportation vehicle...
Strange, how comfort implies safety... good point...
I want to be gone without even knowing it, could do without thinking about my dental bills first.
Are you describing planes?
@@tophan5146 yes... Planes, trains, cars... Exception is Sojuz rocket, no comfort there... 😀
@@tophan5146 These guys don't know they are practically in a Hyperloop Everytime they step on a plane
@@cedriceric9730 Minus a cumbersome tube. :)
This is _far_ too "optimistic" about H-L.
I'm a professional engineer who has dealt with railways and large industrial plant. H-L is possible, as is anything that does not break the laws of physics : you just need to throw lot and _LOTS_ of money at it. H-L will need _huge_ amounts of money to make it a practical proposition, but it will never be an economic one.
Well, know-it-all, out-of-his/her-depth TH-camr begs to differ ... who are we to disagree? :D
It's just daft...who is going to spend billions on a tunnel that implodes spectacularly the first time someone decides to poke a hole in it?! Why spend all that money on infrastructure when you can throw a plane into the air with just an airport at either end (simplified I know). I like Elon but you have to understand that for every genius thing he does, he comes out with 50 pipe dreams...this is one of them
@@bagpussmacfarlan9008 And that one genius thing was not his idea but something he stole.
Yes, the Hyperloop would fail on economics, being more expensive and inferior in every other way than speed to existing alternatives or even non-vacuum maglev. But it would also fail on maintainability and safety.
The walls of the vacuum tubes and all discontinuities in them (welds, expansion joints, vacuum suction points, stations for passenger boarding/unboarding etc.) would be exposed to extreme wear and thermal expansion problems. For maintenance, you would have to stop all traffic and let air in, and then send some non-vacuum maintenance vehicle across the tube. You would have to sweep the inside of the tunnel clean of any rust, dust or (worst case) small chunks of metal broken off at the stations or vacuum suction points.
The first thing one would think of with regards to safety is explosive depressurization in case something damages the tube - but there are several other issues. In modern rail tunnels, there are all kinds of safety systems to help evacuation & firefighting, _none_ of which are applicable to a vacuum tube and pressurized capsules within it, they would be death traps (and not just the capsule suffering an accident, but all those stuck behind it). The capsules would have to work not even like airplanes but like spaceships, with autonomous air supply & purification, and enclosed-space fire protection.
@@Daneelro Doesn't really matter, whatever people think of him he's made stuff happen that not many (if any) could have done the way he has. I've run my own businesses and making shit actually happen the way you want it is hard. He's done it on an epic scale...more than once.
I think the sealings are also a big problem. You have a vacuum in the tube, but pressure in the capsule. And you need airlocks at the stations. And they have to work perfectly if you dont want to die.
Yeah and talk about termal expansion in a vacuum tube. They are literally going to have to invent some kind of vacuum seal that contracts and expands with the material. This thing has huge problems.
That’s not a big deal. You don’t actually need perfect seals on the capsules any more than is already done with airplanes. And in the tube it doesn’t need to be perfect either you just need the vacuum pumps to be able to keep up.
@@JayVal90 And where do you get the air to keep the pressure up in the leaking (like an airplanes) capsule?
The same tube you are trying to vacate to a vacuum?
@@benghazi4216 Yes. It’s called a compressor pump. You don’t need a complete vacuum in the tube, and the more vacuum the faster you go (so more to compress)
I work with both very large vacuum and very large pressurised gas system. No sealing is 100% perfect and they dont have to be. Tehy all leak at soem rate - they just have to seal at 99.999% - and this is easy and known engineering. The chances of a seal going from 99.999% to suddenly 0% sealing can be engineered to be less than chance of being hit by lightning.
Remember vacuum is at -1 Bar. Gas systems - especially deadly harardous gas system are often high pressure - a few bar to 100Bar. You find them all around you. But they don't fail or kill you (mostly).
A non issue (IMHO)
The Hyperloop is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Or rather, it's a solution looking for a problem.
Trains are just better for medium distance travel and planes are just better at long distances with way more flexibility.
Besides, mass transit is not just an engineering problem. It's mainly a political one as well. The Hyperloop will run into the same problems that high speed rail is running into in North America, which is NIMBYISM.
It's the answer to rails problems
Rail is feasible for Europe and Japan but America is a massive first world country , making maglevs to cover the distances will cost as much as Hyperloop with even less utility!
😂😂
@@cedriceric9730 How does a plain maglev cost as much as a maglev plus an enormous tube plus enormous vacuum pumps plus air-locks for entry and exit?
"The Hyperloop is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist." EXACTLY!!
@@lexlayabout5757 Moron Musk cultists are too stupid and lazy to make the LEAST effort to ask such ELEMENTARY questions.
@@cedriceric9730 Idiotic analysis. What relevance does the size of America have to the problem at hand? You are aware that India, China, and Russia have massive railway networks, right? It's because the Americans organised their entire transportation infrastructure around cars and there are now massive political and economic pressures to keep the traffic circus going. Nothing to do with being "first world".
And when the vehicle loses pressure inside the tube, we all look like Arnold at the end of Total Recall.
Ironically, it was the remake that had an actual "hyperloop" subway though.
That is actually a myth. Human body doesn't just bloat like that in low pressure.
@@remliqa Was that movie not actually filmed on location on Mars too? Tell me more.
@@DavidGuyton
No, it was actually filmed in a studio on Arrakis. Right next to Kubrick's Apollo set.
@@remliqa
Also, The person from the YT channel "The Action Lab" , put his forearm in a vacuum chamber.
Even with little vacuum, his hand was swelling quick.
th-cam.com/video/iWGGMchu6mQ/w-d-xo.html
Hey Sabine, since you are German I assume you are well aware of the extrodanary success of the "Transrapid" or as the rest of the world called it the "Maglev". The Transrapid works perfectly fine (I know coz I used in in Shanghai), the one problem with the train is that it is ridiculously expensive to build the track, due to the reasons you already explained in your video. Now here comes the question, when you add to an existing Transrapid track a vacuum tube how can it make things cheaper? I have only 13th grade math skills but in my mind if I add something to a given value, then the value increases. So as long as we can't find anybody who is willing to build the vacum tube for free and additionally would contribute money to the whole project without the desire to get anything in return, as long as this is the case, the hyperloop will not start off, not today and not in a million years.
Oh and btw I am sure that you are very aware that the highest drag on an airplane is produced by the wings, but if it does not need to fly and when can put it on rails we can just skip the wings, so a plane on rails is right from the start the better version of hyperloop.
Indeed this is also exactly why it is already theoretically possible to make a regular maglev run at 1000 km/h without needing the tube. I believe China is working on the test track for such a system, will have to see what speed it achieves in practice. Japan has been running their tests at up to 603 km/h but they only had a speed target of around 600 km/h anyway for their system I believe. But yeah the system gets a lot more practical if you figure out how to do it without the tube as you are no longer limited to very low frequencies due to it taking an hour or more to redraw the vacuum in the station airlocks before each train arrives. It is well known a transit system needs frequencies better than that ie at least once every 20-30 minutes or so in order to attract good ridership as people need to know there will be a transit vehicle available close to the desired time of travel throughout the day.
For me the Hyperloop is purely a publicity stunt resp. a fun toy for tech nerds of a university to TRAIN (lol) solving techical problems.
Only maglev would make sense, but I do not know of much effort to get the maglev technlology into a Hyperloop tube. It is still all on wheels. And I do NOT want wheels at 1000 mph.
They show streamlined pods (when there is no drag in a vacuum???), and know that here are 28 passengers. But there is NOTHING about the technical installations.
The speed advantage makes only sense in a real-world application when you cover long distances, several hundred miles. That means you must send MULTIPLE pods into the tube, and extract them from the tube IN TIME.
What happens when there is an issue with the airlock? The pods would queue up in a hermetically sealed steel tube, until the airlock is repaired.
When something happens, a pod must be able to stop on its own - And it needs an autonomous life support system - for several hours in any case.
How do you insert the pods into the airlock of the tube?
The planned clearance of the pod in the tube is mere inches. So you cannot squeeze past it. The access hatch is planned at the side. So you cannot get out of the pod in the tunnel. Even when you cut off the front or back end of the pod, it is still in the way, it fills the whole diameter. You would have to cut up the end into small pieces until you get past the remains.
It is just 28 people/pod, but promised to be a cheap mass transport system. It is unavoidable that you enter the pod, it is sealed, then you have to wait in the hermetically sealed pod until it is your turn in the airlock
You will probably be able to calculate the capacity of the tube simply by calculating the braking distance from full speed to zero, that is the minimum distance between two pods.
For a plane, to slow down, you just have to reduce thrust, then the drag slows you automatically down, the faster, the more you are slowed down.
In a vacuum tube, there is nothing like that. So the autonomous emergency brake must be able to provide all the energy to destroy the kinetic energy of a 1,000 kph pod in, say, a minute, which is already a good 6 km (4 mls) braking distance with 5m/s^2 (1/2g) braking.
The technology is not the problem. But the logistics of a mass transport system - THAT makes it not feasible in ANY way.
@@feedingravens With a maglev the emergency braking is usually accomplished by installing systems that allow the vehicle to safely exploit the loss of levitation when the drive system fails to massively increase friction and thus stop the vehicle without destroying it in the process. Basically gravity takes over without the magnets driving it to levitate and it falls onto some alternate support system that both supports the vehicle safely and produces a ton of friction this could be skis or wheels mounted on high friction bearings or with permanently applied friction brakes or whatever.
Sure the craft will essentially fall a couple of inches in this event but this is manageable with shock absorbers on the mountings of this equipment you are talking a few tens of centimetres per second down at impact, well within the range of the shock absorption components of aircraft landing gear etc (Typically those are designed for a ground collision at a vertical speed of -1.5 metres per second or so).
@@seraphina985 that is no quite accurate. The emergancy breake of transrapid is a ediecurrent breake just like on high speed train. The friktion plate is a total system failure fallback. It also don't destroy the train. The plate just need changing. So far that system have never been used in a emergancy. Only in testning.
@@matsv201 Yeah I guess I should have pointed out the fact that even without power the train will still levitate from the induced current in the coils while it is still moving fast enough. But ultimately the point will come where the current will drop to the point the magnetic field wont be sufficient to fully support the weight of the train so what goes up will come down eventually.
My point was mostly that there are ways to handle that worst case scenario safely though, as I say we can build landing gear that takes the impact load of an A380 carry 600fpm of vertical speed this is really not a huge problem. Especially since by the time it does come to rest it will probably have a somewhat similar horizontal speed I guess, it wont still be doing 500 or 1000 km/h as there is more than enough energy in it's momentum to power the magnets still then.
2:22 The problem already - "trains could reach 430 km/h". Well, that's what the Shanghai Maglev Train already reaches, and especially in Switzerland, you probably can't go that much faster as you still need to stay below certain G values, not only for safety, but also for comfort, and also below certain speeds if the tube or tracks have to be curved.
You can't even go that faster in Europe because you are already out of the country.
Exactly. We _already have_ this technology without the ridiculous idea of a hundred kilometre vacuum tube needed! his idea is just a total boondoggle
The point is going way past beyond speed of sound.
Shanghai Maglev train, unfortunately, is an extremely expensive money-sink. Sure, it's fast (I've ridden it) but it is absolutely not economically viable. A normal electric train at 2/3 the speed but 1/5 the cost would be a much better solution.
In Switzerland you would have to brake 30sec. after accelerating...
I've seen how good we are at preventing leaks in our long pipes of crude oil.
I'm in no hurry to end up as a mess in the gulf of Mexico.
I loved the joke at 2:25 ;)
As an engineer I'm very skeptical about the Hyperloop ever since I first heard about it. Creating and maintaining such a large volume with vacuum just wouldn't be economically viable and there are plenty of safety concerns. Sure it's a cool idea and it's fun to think about how would we solve the engineering problems, but ultimately I highly doubt we will ever see a large scale public transport based on Hyperloop.
So was landing a rocket. Might be hard, but these are the fun challenges else what's the point.
@@runningman5871 Being able to solve hard engineering problems is one thing, making the solution safe and profitable enough is another. I see much more similarity with Concorde, which finally failed on exactly these points and that's why we don't have supersonic passenger planes right now, even though the engineering challenges were solved many decades ago. Also consider the alternatives - we already have buses, trains, taxis etc. all of which are slower, but much cheaper (like current passenger planes).
While the technical challenges may seem tempting to solve, the question remains, how fast do we need to go? Would it be worth a five thousand dollar ticket just to get somewhere twice as fast? Everyday passenger jets travel from 400 to 600 mph, and a ticket can be had for a few hundred dollars. The number of people who would be willing to pay 5 times that much to go twice as fast would be few. It’s a solution looking for a problem, the truth is, no one really needs to go that fast. If the Concorde were built today, using modern materials, I’m sure they could solve the problems that eventually grounded the historic aircraft. But no one is doing it, why? Because there is no demand.
@@alphagt62 Demand is a mysterious thing. Just before railroads and trains, people was also wondering what kind of mad hurry would make other people want to risk their lives traveling at the insane speed of 50 km/h.
Sometimes, when the technology is ready, the demand just appears (but not always)
@@juanausensi499 Okay let's assume with 100% certainty the demand will appear, should we do this anyway? It's an insanely resource intensive project that requires a lot of maintenance which won't impact 99.999% of peoples lives in any way whatsoever. In a time when environmental concerns are high and we are becoming increasingly aware of the limited nature of our resources, should we invest our resources and brainpower in this effectively useless thing... Probably not and certainly not with public tax money.
We just have far bigger problems to solve without making said problems even worse just to improve the QoL for a few people. Maybe in the future when things are looking brighter but right now it seems like a bad idea overall.
Put ultra dense Polyethylene, a more lubricant surface than Teflon, in the base of the tube and another layer on the bottom of the train, build the train and the base with capillary tubes for water and have pumps controlled by computers inside the train that pump soapy water to the outside of the Poly to maintain a hydraulic layer between the train and the tube bottom. A wheel system will need to be deployable as needed to move the train at slower speeds in emergencies and for maneuverability in the station and for parking, maintenance, and workshop procedures.
Interesting video, thank you! I am curious, did you watch any of Thunderf00t's videos on the Hyperloop?
Isn't that the dude who went off the deep end like a decade ago? Started being vitriolic and anti-women?
Hyperloop is a good idea in principle, but NOT practical.
It happened a lot. Something invented, which is VERY good, but has serious drawbacks, and the benefits can not justify the high efforts.
Besides, hyperloop is terrorists wettest dream: with absolutely minimum effort a gigantic catastrophe can be caused...
I don't think I did, sorry. At least the name doesn't ring a bell. Will check this out though, thanks for mentioning!
@@Call-me-Al Not even close. But good to see you have some vague judgemental idea about someone
Just in case Its been missed the idea dates back to pre 1800, Brunel had an "atmospheric railway" working in Devon in UK in 1844. It was not a succedd though.
The buildings are still there beside the replacement normal railway.
Quite a different concept though.
Not the same thing at all.
The atmospheric railway was very uncharacteristic for Brunel, who normally didn't come up with nonsensical projects. It is beyond me, how he could ever have thought that one could keep a tolerable pressure difference with a slot open at the top, 'sealed' with two leather flaps, and the train connected with a kind of piston through a moving gap between those flaps.
The hyperloop is still a very different concept, though not likely to be economically sensible or safe enough.
Hyperloop is interesting as a hypothetical concept and I understand that this is a physicists' perspective. But to me the biggest issue with the Hyperloop is the potential for it to take away from investment in green technology that already works: good old electric passenger rail (doesn't have to be high speed for most routes)
Maybe you should campaign to divert funding from cosmetics or party popper manufacturing into green projects.
it doesnt theoretically work because the distances needed to accelerate it to the speed where the lack of air makes a difference cannot be achieved on any train line on earth
I don't remember russia planning to build a direct china-europe line so every single one of these is a scam, unless you're giving the benefit of the doubt to professionals working on this as their main job that they have not figured out the already well known main issue with the concept their entire project and salary is dependant on
@@andrewpaulhart Nice try, but this whataboutism doesn't apply here.
@
unknownPLfan is talking about investments in infrastructure and there's a difference between unrelated industries and money being diverted from reasonable investments into inefficient vapourware targeting the same problem (i.e. public transport infrastructure).
@@anonymous-rb2sr > because the distances needed to accelerate it to the speed where the lack of air makes a difference cannot be achieved on any train line on earth
Repeat after me: "Tokyo-Osaka".
Much of the time, I am so enthralled by your superb diction and flawless delivery that I lose track of what we are discussing today! I could listen to SH all day - and sometimes do.
Literally a pipe dream.
Courtesy of Elon's bong
There is another technical problem : security distances.
The faster you go the more delay in between vehicle is needed to minimize the severity of accidents, should something wrong happen. To keep the corridor capacity reasonably high, and thus share the infrastructure cost on more people, you need to stuff up each vehicle, and that is not compatible with pods.
Hmmm... lets say we have figured out how to make trains with large enough cabin and move just fast enough to depart every 3 minutes. Will this good enough to throw hyperloop out the window?
@@geoffrygifari3377 not exactly : for a single track the minimum delay between each train is dominated by the speed at which they go (and signaling considerations : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headway ).
The faster you go, the lower the train frequency, and this has to be compensated by making big trains and filling them up, because building and maintenance of the infrastructure is ultimately paid by the passengers.
With pods, hyperloop systems propose a pitiful maximum of 2000 passenger per direction per hour, the same as one line of a highway.
For a comparison, the shinkansen on the Tokyo-Kyoto line operate at ten times that, with fares somewhere around 120-160$ for a 475 km (300 miles) and 2h trip, without putting everything under a vacuum.
The proposed fares given by hyperloop developers are just outlandish.
@@jeanf6295 then i guess the tokyo shinkansen system should be spread worldwide (maybe it already has.... not where i am)
Please! That should be cubits per fortnight for us British.
*googles cubit* -- Didn't know that's a unit! I only know it as a family name. (Of a guy who works on qbits, fittingly.)
Don't be silly the unit is "Furlongs per Fortnight"
@@dogwalker666 That's the Newmarket unit, not the Norwich Fens unit.
@@tetleyk ahh right.
From what I understand, the speeds where this thing would be thinkable are such that if all the practical difficulties were to be overcome, we would end up with a vastly more expensive and orders of magnitude more hazardous version of a high-speed train.
So you don't understand. Happens to a lot of people on the internet. ;-)
Feel free to enlighten me :)
@@NoIce33 How can I? Your teachers failed, already. ;-)
Vacuum tubes and superconducting magnets in a loop? It sounds like a huge particle collider disguised as a transportation system :)
I would really like if you also touched the problem of the engergy consumption of building and keeping a vaccuum in such a big tube.
when you understand the physics and the technical difficulties of projects like these you realise why many things people dreamed about won't happen in these decades but also open the opportunity to get creative
While fast , and efficient transportation is a good thing there are also other good things. Some might call them pressing needs.
How about things we routinely hear about?
Human trafficing prevention or freeing enslaved people.
Illiteracy, misinformation and DISINFORMATION reforms.
Hunger and malnutrition solutions.
Female freedom from honor killing.
Homelessness solutions.
Care for mental illness victims.
Drug addiction cures.
We may think we have got this all under control. It just means, if you think that, you are lost in the weeds and are clueless.
@@josephtraficanti689 These sound like issues mostly found in other countries, though. While I agree these happen in many places, as a country we have a limited amount of resources and a constant pressure to be better. Things like honor killings, extreme sexism, many types of terrorism etc sound more like religious/cultural things that are up to the originating countries or sections of the world to fix. Our job here in the west would be to simply stop that from coming here and focus instead in some of our more modern problems.
There are also many organizations, movements, and even government departments focused on many of the issues you listed above. They are just not as well-known because a sci-fi train sounds better.
@@josephtraficanti689 All those issues are simply due to dumb and stupid humans. The ONLY solution is global genocide alone the line of a James Bond supervillain to remove the stupid and the greedy and reboot the planet.
If you do the math for the thermal expansion of a 600 Km tube made of medium-high grade steel (SS316), you will immediately find that such a long tube can't be made.
Moreover, the thickness of the tube wall, in order to resist without deformation to 100 Pascal of internal pressure, would make it prohibitively expensive. It has to resist to almost 1 kg/cm² of pressure!
Also, to hold 100 Pascal inside for such a big volume, you need a vacuum pump every 10 meters. The power consumption of all vacuum pumps for 600 km of length is literally insane.
I agree that the hyperloop is hype going in loop.
The hyperloop is a transportation system suitable for environments already in a vacuum, like the lunar surface, where you don't need a tube to keep the vacuum.
Just like transporting humans to Mars while keeping them in full health (by countering the lack of gravity and the strong solar/cosmic radiation), the hyperloop is another example of possible-but-unfeasible endeavour...
Ma! The kid who doesn't even know the physical units is here. ;-)
What's scary is, if the gap between the car and the tube is as small as I've seen illustrated, how do emergency exits even work? Assuming there's a power failure, even if there's atmosphere in the tube, how do you even get out of the car and get to the tube exit? You'd have to wait for someone outside to find your car, and then drag/tow it to the exit.
It is all possible....but so highly improbable it wont happen. Just like Musk's tunnels. All BS
if the tunnel loses power but the train is fine, perhaps you could have batteries/back up fuel cells of some sort to drive the train at low speeds to an emergency airlock, maglev trains already have wheels to get them going at low speeds. Or you could exit though the front or back of the train after the tunnel outside has breathable air. There's probably no way for it to be as safe as a train, but it only needs to be as safe as concorde or other compareable transport services.
@@plainText384 1. They didnt propose wheels. 2. There are soooooo many problems that make this improbable enough to be financially impossible the one you mentioned fades into insignificance. 3. Concorde had one of the worst commercial aviation crashes and isnt in service anymore.
@@GahMehGrrrr1. the sort of magnetic levitation that trains use only works once you have already achieved a certain speed (the maglev trains in japan need to go about 150 km/h to hover 10 cm above the air) so maglev trains have tires that fold in after going fast enough for the magnets to support the full weight of the train at a safe hight above the train.
@@GahMehGrrrr 2. Fixing safety issuses is mostly seperate from commercial viability 3. Thats exactly my point, it doesn't have to be super safe to use, after all they thought the concorde was safe enough to make it a reality. The bar to clear for supersonic passenger transport isn't set super high.
As a structural engineer, I've followed your channel for a while now. I've learned a lot about a number of very esoteric subjects, thank you for all your efforts in communicating science so well. And now I thank you for citing my own work on the hyperloop bridge dynamics!
You wrote than resonance issue paper???!
@@yugen3968 yes with colleagues at Southampton University
@@nicholasalexander3234 Keep on brother! Btw, do you think hyperloop is a feasible concept to materialize today, or is it just a less efficient bullet train - or as Sabine said "hype in a loop"?!
@@yugen3968 Yes, it is within the reach of current technology, but there are a number of difficult design challenges typical of completely novel design projects. The heart of the conceptual design is to balance cost, risk and what is technically achievable. This balance is the art of engineering, imagining, intuiting a good solution, understanding the physics and mathematics, and then creating something that never was! The problems of vibrations, earthquakes, thermal expansion, vacuum maintenance, transition curves etc are all surmountable problems. I think that someone will do it in the next couple of decades.
I'm a little surprised by the relative positivity of this video compared to how actually impractical hyperloops seem if you start really calculating anything.
Isn't the larger problem the amount of potential energy that such a large vacuum chamber would represent simply due to the difference in pressure between the inside and out? You mentioned some things which would threaten the security of the vacuum, but not so much what would happen if it would fail. If we even take a short 10km track which has a radius of about 2m, say would have a volume of 125 million litres or so, so multiplying that by an approximately 100kPa difference in pressure gives us about 1.25 * 10^10 joules of potential energy, or about 3 tons of TNT -- roughly a third of a ton of TNT per kilometre is surely enough energy to do severe damage to the entire track and any of its inhabitants should the vacuum containment fail. Nevermind that if this should happen toward one end of the tube, it turns the rest of the tube into what is effectively the barrel of a giant gun for firing passenger cars. A 2 ton car on the edge of the pressure wave would see a 1.25 MN force and be accelerated at roughly 64g, which, though admittedly a very rough estimate, is solidly in the range of pretty terrifying and deadly.
Note that the largest vacuum chamber in the world at present is NASA's Space Power Facility, which, if we're looking at the outer chamber that gets pumped down to 2kPa or so, is a mere 58 million litres, and for that, it consists of concrete that is around 2 metres thick, encasing a leak-tight steel containment barrier embedded in the concrete. Hyperloop folks talk about vacuum chambers running much longer distances between cities -- especially as you can't accelerate up to such high speeds on too short of a track, so the numbers quickly dwarf my 125 million litre example above.
The fact that the vacuum is going to constantly leak at some rate and represents so much energy means that it's very easy for the power consumption of the pumps to be insanely high. Once you have a track that's many kilometres long, with all sorts of joints that need to be perfectly airtight (and being destroyed by expansion and contraction), it's very difficult to imagine how this will be maintained.
In short, it seems both extremely wasteful, and extremely unsafe. Even if we can do it, we probably ought not to. How about just building some more ordinary maglev trains?
Good points! I get the same numerical results. It's a startling idea if anything goes wrong. It seems easily prone to failures and attacks.
Perhaps they could suck out the air (partially) only in that segment ,where a split second later the train arrives?? That would take good AI but we have that now. The rest of the tube might want to fill that near vacuum but "too late". However they could not obtain a near vacuum in one movement, in one split second but only low pressure I think.
@@jean-pierredevent970 pulling a vacuum is not that fast, and your idea hinges on still wasting that potential energy between trains, so you have to depressurize everything every time a train passes, menaing an even bigger energy consumption than before
I mean even maglev trains are kind of dumb, an high speed train gets almost to the same velocity and there is much more know how on how to do it good and efficiently. plus its track are compatible with other trains and can arrive in normal ass stations
@@jean-pierredevent970 That would be way worse. I'll assume 100m sections, but the section length doesn't matter much. A 100m section of 3.3m hyperloop has about 3500m^3 volume. A transsonic train would be arriving at that 100m section at 343 m/s, which means it will be in that section for less than 300ms. And you want to evacuate the air in that section, so let's say it's already kept to a nominal pressure of 1/2 atm (still quite a lot of PE). You still need to move over two tons of air out of each section. A train at one end of the track will have to have the tube cleared out ahead of it, and hopefully it's self evident that moving 2 tons of air in 300ms is nuts. Let's say the train waits until the tube has been cleared to the halfway point, and it's 100km long in total. That's 500 x 100m sections that need to be cleared out. Budget be damned, let's put a huge vacuum pump on each section. Assuming a gentle acceleration of 1/3g, the train will reach 343m/s when it's 22.3km down the track, after 117 seconds, and will reach midway in an additional 81 seconds (198 total, we'll call it 200). So before it reaches that first section, it needs to evacuate 2 tons of air in 200 seconds. The power requirement can be calculated as Power = ΔP×V/t (difference in pressure times volume, over time), and that works out to 0.87 MW (megawatts, enough to power over 700 homes), if such a pump existed, for that *one* section of tube *assuming perfect efficiency and ignoring heat transmission line losses,* which is insane, and the other sections still need to be evacuated as well. And I don't really see how each section is going to be sealed independently with any kind of speed and safety. Even if it could be done, the energy requirements for the pumps alone would be orders of magnitude worse than an ordinary atmospheric pressure maglev.
I find it very hard to picture how this could be economically viable - the hyperloop would be buying a stack of hard, expensive technological problems in order to get rid of air resistance - when probably it would be better to find a way of just living with the air resistance.
Part of the problem was Musk trying to get away from the train concept by use of small pods. Most of the air resistance of a train at high speed comes from nose and tail effects. The length of the train between has little effect so a good smooth modern train bodyshell, designed to run through ground-level air pressure on earth on rails or maglev is actually fairly efficient in this respect, but as many cars as possible need to be crammed between the front and rear fairings to obtain maximum benefit. Musk rejects the notion of large coupled trains running (say) every 30 minutes however, in favour of tiny pods every few seconds, hence vacuum is required because of all that cumulative nose and tail resistance. Control tech also faces significant challenges safely keeping these many pods sufficiently separated in motion. I say to have any hope, companies working on this need to lose the vacuum tube and mechanically couple the pods together into a conventional length train.
It's economically viable because of lower energy cost and speed
The maximum speed of maglev is the lower end of hyperloop
@@cedriceric9730 I don't think I've seen what I think is a proper estimate of the costs... But constantly pumping down huge vacuum tubes isn't going to be free. Musk seems pretty confident the capital costs will be lower than the conventional high speed rail being built all over the world... Conventional rail is surprisingly expensive to build but a lot of that that's cos its got to be engineered to be really safe, really reliable and really durable.
Short version: We can start building them around the time we can power them with fusion reactors scattered along the way. Now... what was the current (running) prediction for an operational fusion reactor?
What fusion reactors? I thought they'd be powered by Solar Freakin' Roadways
Technically there already are operational fusion reactors, much like the Hyperloop they don't generate net profit, though 😉
30 years ago, Fusion was "50 years away and always would be."
10 years ago fusion was "30 years away and always would be."
Now fusion is 20 years away and people like you aren't paying attention so the fossil fuel industry can easily manipulate you. Cheers!
Twenty years from now since forty years ago.
@@totalermist Just as we have a few maglev train samples out there, but still far from being practical.
As with the others, hyperloop is a nice concept that may one day become a reality, but to date, it has no financial relevance. Meaning, nobody will build a profitable public transportation system based on it any time soon. And we are talking about decades here.
It doesn't mean the concept has to be discarded, but to stay in Elon-world, people will walk on Mars before this happens.
The dry humor on this one reached new heights. I love learning and laughing at the same time.
Thanks for the hands per fortnight, really appreciate the inclusion :) We also quite enjoy a furlong or two (the average distance a team of oxon can plough before requiring a rest, or 1/8th of a mile).
I got the 'hands per fortnight' but I dont understand what it means.
No doubt it's a kick in the goolies.
I have travelled on the Shanghai magnetic train at 430 km per per hour. It was built by the Germans.
The Brits had one first at B'ham airport so I expect the Germans stole our designs hehe
Calculating the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight was a standard challenge back in high school days.
@@divvy1400yam600 It's how they measure the height of a horse.
@gustaw sząposki Yes, two weeks.
how many slugs are there in a horse? we may never know....
interesting, Sabine didn't go into the forces acting on an evacuated tunnel with such a radius and the difficulty of maintaining the vaccuum over many kilometers. I guess the only thing of anywhere close to similar dimensions is the evacuated tunnel for the beamline magnets (insulation vaccum) at the LHC which i think has a radius of ~0.5m and is 27km long with ~200m long subsections. The vacuum is ofcourse overkill for a hyperloop at ~e^-6 mbar (~5 e-3mbar after 200hrs of pumping) according to a CERN brochure i found by Paul Cruikshank.
Will the passengers have pressure suits? Otherwise even a small breach of the capsule could kill them with 70 hPa pressure outside.
I'm skeptical about the hyperloop concept, but how much of a difference is this compared to planes? If a plane tube breaches catastrophically , people die.
If there is a a small breach in a plane, the pilot drops the plane to a save height. If a small breach occurs in the hyperloop wagon, maybe a section of the tube could be flooded with air.
Do passengers have pressure suits in the airplanes?
@@steffenpanning2776 A plane can perform an emergency descent. A capsule stuck in the tube cannot. And in the case of a tunnel, any rescue mission would be very difficult.
@@skipperg4436 First, passenger planes do not fly in the stratosphere; 70 hPa is roughly 18 km altitude (pilots who fly that high have pressure suits). Second, they can descend rapidly to save the passengers and it did work many times. A hyperloop capsule cannot.
@@skipperg4436 Third, a plane does not fly close to metal (or concrete) walls which threaten the integrity of the capsule if anything goes wrong.
Mm.... I'm gonna be bolder, it won't happen in the next 8 decades. I feel like Sabine in this video severely underestimated the magnitude of problems mentioned.
Agreed.
"Underestimated" is quite the understatement! I felt quite embarrassed for her when she looked rather excited by its "potential"!!
Oh I'm sure at least ONE city will fall for the hype and sink billions of taxpayer money into making it a reality.
It will be useless and bankrupt said city.
I have long suspected that there is vacuum inside Elon Musk's brain...
You didn't really mention just how insanely dangerous vacuum tubes are. If one implodes--and they do so quite forcefully--everyone in the entire tube for hundreds of miles may die.
I just thought about traveling from the west coast of Europe to the east coast of northern America. Some 100 years ago, and before it, it took you about a week to do it by ship, maybe even a bit longer. Then came the airplane, and eventually it would take some eight hours. That meant a huge gain in time, and relatively cheap. Then one may think of a hyperloop, extremely expensive no doubt, and instead of those eight hours it may take you, say, four hours. Is that four hour gain really worth the effort? And remember: from home to destination there are the trips to and from the airport, or hyperloop station, so whichever means you use to travel, you use, lose a day for traveling from one side to the other side of the ocean anyway.
You have the wrong use-case. This is for medium-length journeys between cities separated by hundreds of miles, up to a thousand miles, not cross- or inter-continental journeys. LAX to SFO or SEA, not LHR to LGA. An airplane journey usually includes an hour or more of idle time in the airport, which itself is usually sited outside the city center. A Hyperloop system is intended to be faster than high-speed rail, but with a similar endpoint footprint.
It would be extremely challenging to build it under the Atlantic, approaching impossible with current tech. Atlantic goes up to 7 km in depth, so the pressure would be immense. Maybe if we invent gravitational force field one day.
@@jackwilson5542 Yes, that narrows it down to land travel, like the train for mid distance and the plane for long distance. I’m not sure such a hyperloop would be worth the effort and money, purely based on the gain in time, certainly when adding the to and from time to station / airport, as a hyperloop station will not be available within 20 kilometers for most travelers, and not providing a connection to every useful place to be, thus there is the need to change track a few times, with additional waiting time. My bet: a no go.
@@Markle2k first, the economics doesnt make sense...are you/thousands of ppl a day willing to over $5K a loop ticket for a SF-LA trip? then u also have safety and politics and of course, the science to overcome. This is a dumb conversation. We need light rail public transit transit, not grifting.
@@newagain9964 You are pulling numbers out of a dark and smelly place. And light rail does not serve inter-metro area distances. We have light rail in the Bay Area. If you extended it to LA, the trip would take 15 hours at the standard 25 mph top speed. And you would still have the same right-of-way issues as high-speed rail and hyperloop.
There's plenty of well-founded skeptism about hyperloops. Thunderf00t _et al_ have many videos on this. But I remember my own eyebrow raising moment when Musk said that the vehicle (in a near vacuum apparently), would be levitated _on an air bed._ Musk said, in an interview, "this isn't difficult!" Well, it begged the question, why pump air into a tube desperately trying to suck air out? Some time later when an audience member asked Musk what mechanism would actually be used, Musk hummed and bumbled around and eventually mumbled, "wheels".
Vactrains concepts are often about ramming a partial vacuum and creating themselves a localized cushion of air they can slip on. Think of it as a lube to avoid touching the side of the pipe while still being guided.
Sabine dissing the imperial measuring system... absolute comedy gold 😂
Thunderf00t has some "back of the napkin" calculations that make this idea an impractical pipe dream. I agree with Tim Thompson (below). Pulling a 99.9% vacuum in such a large space is the primary (and practically insurmountable) problem. We can accommodate mag-lev and design aerodynamics to allow for airflow etc...but pulling a vacuum in such a large area is a non-starter. The thing I didn't hear anyone talk about was the negative pressure model. where the back of the vehicle is at differential pressure from the front...like the bank tube example in Sabine's video. This is not a vacuum tube as proposed by Musk. Rather, it is a tube system where there is a pressure differential between the front and back of the tube. If the pressure in front of the vehicle is negative, you could (theoretically) reach the pretty high speeds (less than the speed of sound) without issue. It would be a complicated design but much less complicated than the vacuum tube model and fast enough for government work.
@Carl Klinkenborg Agree. Likely not practical...but, still more practical than pulling a vacuum in the same sized tube.
Was interesting hearing your take on it. I think it is directly irresponsible to spend money on the project since we have alternatives that are less dangerous, less costly and already works, like trains. It is hard enough to get governments to invest in public transportation when it is cost effective and it is sad to see when governments invest in some fantasy tech dream. Especially since it is not only expensive in terms of resources and effort to build, it is also costly to maintain. For the only two benefits of "very fast transportation" and "showing off tech" it seems quite wasteful I think.
I also think that as technology improves regarding local high speed manufacturing and various digital remote presence solutions, the need for sending goods and people in extreme velocity will go down. Hopefully we will learn to just relax a bit, endure a bit longer transportation to conserve our precious planet and mental health.
Anyway, thank you for great content as usual!
I agree on more trains. Then if we wan't to go fast air resistance increase roughly with the square of the speed so it quickly get less energy effiecient the faster we go. So I think we should invest something in research for hyperloop trains... Don't know how much or how much practical tests that should be done know.
Lately that model has become the norm: companies that no longer focus on providing a service or creating a product, but generating hype to get investor money, go public, pump up their stock with more hype, and finally sell before the scheme crashes down.
@Wemple AMEN!
AMEN, Mikael!
The vacuum can easily be held with a series of deflector shields inside the tunnel. Don't know why you'd go through all that trouble though when transporter bays are everywhere, ready to instantly beam you anywhere in the solar system for peanuts.
Could you explain deflector shields? Sounds like something from Star Trek to me lol.
@@suqd674 exactly :-)
I suggest people do a YT search for "hyperloop debunked" or "hyperloop scam". Its probably time sensible channels like this one avoid the reputational damage from mentioning it.
My biggest issue here is the safety of the tube. Since no plan has been put forward that acurately adresses the safety concerns with vacuum breaches, the wave of air that travels at the speed of sound would literally pulverize anyone inside the entire tunnel. Yes that is what happens when you repressurize a system from a 99.9% vacuum, not to mention the sudden collaps of the structure onto itself. There are even some videos on youtube that shows this.
I love/support your videos, and I agree that there is nothing in the HyperLoop concept that is physically *impossible* but...
as a theoretical physicist I think you underestimate the difficulty of maintaining a hard vacuum in such a large volume.
The Large Hadron Collider requires a vacuum in a large volume, how long does it take to pump it down?
Now imagine the LHC having to accommodate groups of tourists, who every few hours, wanted to crawl inside and look around.
99% vacuum is not "hard" vacuum.
@@denysvlasenko9175 So what percentage is a hard vacuum?
@@TurinTuramber The "hard" or "high" or "ultra-high" vacuum is one which is not merely close to 0% atmospheric pressure. Depending on application, it means "when there is not enough air to have any chemical interaction with / contamination of materials in the chamber", "when there is not enough air to cause significant scattering of the accelerator beam", "when there is so few molecules, their mean free path is measured in kilometers", and such.
It's much less than 0.1% of atmospheric pressure, sometimes the requirements go as low as one trillionth of atmospheric pressure.
@@denysvlasenko9175 I think my Dad said that their machines were measuring vacuum in many nines, where the level of vacuum was characterized by the exponent, not any petty measure like Pascals. He started working with accelerators and wound up in the semiconductor processing and epitaxy machine design.
Hi Sabine. Thanks for another excellent video. Can you please create a video on Time Crystal?
Thanks for the suggestion. This one is already on the list. "Just" have to think of something intelligent to say about it...
@@SabineHossenfelder Looking forward to it already. :)
@@SabineHossenfelder Am I on the "list"?
I think the engineering side of things is probably the bigger obstance than the physics.
Totally agree with that!
Yup cause you can dig a tunnel on earth longitudinally to reach one place to other in 45 minutes theoretically but engineering is main problem
Honestly this sounds like a transport system for Mars. As noted there are loads of issues but some are specific to Earth. You get the vacuum for free and tunnels are required since people would fry on the surface.
My theory is that Musk wants to get as many of the engineering challenges and potential solutions discovered on Earth. And he's done it in a way that doesn't cost him much money. Another data point for Musk's Mars vision being a mole people Mars colony.
@@KevinLyda The capsule could provide the heating required. With the low atmosphere, you wouldn't need the tunnel at all.
Also, the question is why you would even need fast travel to distant places on Mars. There's nothing out there except rocks and sand.
Bingo.
Your sass increases with each video 😆
Love what you’re doing.
There's something so incredibly satisfying and relieving about someone that's so objective, logical, and factual about the world. Sometimes it feels like the world is drowning in bs/cults and ppl like you are the ones who talk some sense into the world.
cringe comment
Wipe the brown off your nose please.
Off-topic
"In summary, the Hyperloop isn't just hype, it may one day become a real alternative to airplanes."
Sure, try and re-route the capsule or sending it across the waters, through or over mountains, over hills or down in depressions in the topical environment. It looks like to much of technical problems and technical limitations for me to put even a dime into such a project. Good luck University of Münich!
That was just the scientific exprssion of "That stuff will never work, but you can try prove me wrong."
Or you cannot say there is *no* chance at all as long as there is a non-zero chance (however small) to pull it off.
Technische Universität München*
@@Cau_No I didn't mean to say that there is no chance to fix the technical aspects of the project. I bet scientists can remedy the technical bit like for example the vibrations, given enough time.
What I meant was that it's not worth the effort to make it work long distances. If you fix the technical problems, you will just end up with the difficulties of realizing the project. That should have been priority number one to figure out first, before diving into a stupid project like that.
Why do you even want to realize such a project? There is not even any big environmental benefit to it. You just remove the engine from the vehicle and put it somewhere else, for crying out loud. The regular train is a much better solution.
If one wants to move faster in a shorter amount of time you take the airplane. Traveling by jet airplane is a several times more environmental solution than taking the car, did you know that?
A 747 can weight over 800,000lbs. Go back to 1901 and tell people planes will weigh over a half million pounds, carry over 400 people, cruise at 40,000 feet, daily. We didn’t get here by deciding there too many technical limitations.
@@AveragePicker Actually, in the few steps to fix this "personnel tube" it is much easier to imagine that the problems involved with it will be solved. So that is not what I am saying either. I am saying that this future invention will not solve any existing environmental and/or gas shortage problems for mankind. And I am saying that there already exists good enough solutions for traveling at high speeds today.
In 1893 Georg Kostas, a Greek origin scientist from France, explained that train transportation over 70mph is a deadly risk for passengers.
And then there's France
When a hundred people propose a thousand idiotic ideas each, and one person's idea that was thought to be idiotic turns out to be wrong fifty or a hundred years later, does not mean the other 100,000 ideas weren't idiotic.
I started writing this and couldn't stop, I may have over thought it a little.
The problems with hyperloops, after getting it to work that is, is you end up with 1) a single lane, 1 way, transport system,
2) that can only transport a very limited number of people at a time,
3) and you have to have sufficient braking distance between each carriage to allow for carriage break down or failure.
It's not equivalent to a plane because each route has to have a tunnel built.
(If each carriage can carry 30 people and Americans take a minimum 2 million flights per day, that's 66,666 carriages, per day, or just over 46 per minute. But it takes more than 1 minute to load a carriage with people, even if it didn't you would probably want a 1 minute gap between each departure for collision safety. So that's 46 hyper loops all operating constantly 24 hours per day, every day. You need a loop there and a separate one back,because a carriage will always be in transit going in one direction blocking the return journey, so that's 92 loops to construct, maintain, monitor and operate constantly).
It's not a car because it doesn't go to where you want to go (So it won't replace car journeys)
It's not a bus because it doesn't go short distances to near where you want to go. (So it won't replace bus journeys)
It's closest equivalence is a train, but trains main benefit are for heavy, mass freight transport, which the hyperloop is not good for. However Americans make 7.2 million long distance train journeys per day, or to average it out 5000 journeys per minute, which is just over 166 carriages per minute. So that's another 166 hyperloops, 1 way, or 333 both ways. (So now it's 92 loops to replace air travel, 333 to replace long distance rail travel, so 425 loops)
Planes don't make stops, but long distance trains do. A train stops at a station, then starts down the same track. If a train behind doesn't want to slow down the slower train has to be off the main line during its stop and then rejoin behind it and build up enough speed before the next train catches it. If each loop carriage needs a minimum 1 minute distance then in order for a carriage to rejoin the loop after stopping then every carriage further up the loop before the station has to slow down every time a carriage wants to rejoin, in order to re-establish the safe distance.
Say you could have a fast long distance loop with no stops and a slower multi station loop for each route, that's now 850 loops. But in order for a carriage in the slow loop to be able to stop and rejoin the loop and still have a 1 minute safe distance from other carriages on the line without other carriages having to slow down, then actually each carriage needs a 3 minute safe distance, so you need twice as many loops on the slow loop system, so you actually need 1275 hyper loops, operating 24 hours per day.
And that is for a system that has no redundancy at all and requires travellers to travel at a consistent rate 24 hours per day, which I suspect is not the case, and therefore does not meet customer requirements.
Thanks so much Sabine. I hope the public catches up.
There may be more than one reason Elon didn’t go deeper into a hyper loop project. You brought up many interesting points. Thank you.
Because Musk knows it makes no economic sense even if they can solve the engineering problems. At the present time (Dec 2021) it looks like he might get out of SpaceX for similar reasons - the Starship project (and hence the Starlink project) is failing. Musk is no fool but he thinks everyone else is.
I read about "hyperloops" in the 90 in a science magazine, long before Musk was a known figure.
He basically picked up an old idea and let other do the hard work, so he could take credit.
You are way off base.
The electric car concept is over 100 years old yet no-one has had the vision to push it forward until Elon came along. The concept of returnable and reusable orbital class vehicles is also as old as science fiction, but until Elon came along no-one had made any progress.
The concept of the hyperloop (as pointed out in the video) is alos over 100 years old (so that 1990s magazine was also not the originator)
So what if he is not the original inventor - he is the one that has made these things become a reality.
@@poruatokin You realize that Tesla wasn't founded by Elon, right?
Tesla was founded by other people why actually designed the Roadster. Elon strong armed his way into the company and pushed the founders out, then pretended the company was his creation.
Building a freeway takes 20 years of planning but a hyperloop can go underground which overcomes some of the major hurdles which keep high speed rail from even happening in the United States. We can either do invest in the future or let China take control.
@@riderpaul You think you can just dig tunnels under peoples property?
A person starts a company that tries to implement an idea and make money from it. Wow, that's an unheard of business practice, must be a ploy!
Your channel grew so fast!! Wow!! Congratulations!
I've worked it out ! simply make a train in the shape of a Boomerang, and throw it, and it will come back.
Of course, getting off at your destination might pose a slight problem.
You have to leave something on the table for somone elses PhD. There may be a science one (i.e. complicated solution that maybe "works" on paper), and a philosophy one, arguing that you don't really need to get off at your destination at all.
@@olubibabalola I guess the journey would be more interesting than the destination.
@@paulfrancis8836 😄
Just wanted to give a well deserved shout-out to the editor(s); you're doing fantastic work! The orbiting Musk head sequence was a nice touch and made me chuckle.
Edit: ...and Thank You to Sabine, of course! This channel is a 'hidden' gem that I share whenever possible. Your contributions are greatly appreciated.
The hyperloop is quite literally a pipe dream
Sabine, could you please talk about the safety issues? To my understanding, all it needs to sabotage it is to put a hole into the tube, and everything in it will be crushed.
This would make it a primary target for attacks, as a powerful rifle could create such a hole, and also very sensitive to accidents, like vehicles crashing into a pillar. Or am I wrong?
The idea that it would implode has been debunked a long time ago. Thunderf00t got this part of it wrong but he was right as far as it not being a practical solution to travel.
@@georgespalding7640 Thunderf00t has explained in detail why it would implode. Can you explain why it wouldn't?
Came here to say this is one of my favorite channels, Too many science channels are aiming to entertain ideas instead of explain the jargon, analogies and other details in a way that is understandable in common English. Sabine and "The Science Asylum" are the two channels I have found that do this consistently. Not to hate on other channels, its more a misunderstanding of the medium and what it takes to maintain a viewer base.
Ie. Real engineering... everything on that channel is gonna change the world
@@danielmcsween884 Thanks, always good to find a new source of reliable info
I agree with the sentiment that the whole notion of musk pushing the hyperloop was to curtail light rapid rail transportation in California. It would have been an impact on his electric car business.
Hello!
The California Light Rail System began long before Elon Musk founded Tesla.
To this day, not one mile of track for an actual system has ever been laid, and is now $9-billion dollars of tax dollars beyond development budget and 35-years late...
... at doing anything,
Musk built Tesla with actual private money, was built under budget, and on time.
Nobody is perfect, Elon Musk has his problems, but so far, his businesses are doing much better than efforts of the California Government.
@@kd7bwb12 hello! Doesn’t matter when tesla was founded. Rapid rail is in direct conflict with half his portfolio.
@@kansascityshuffle8526
First, the notion of anybody’s portfolio having anything to do with a project funded by tax dollars is simply ludicrous.
If the government wanted a rapid rail system, in truth, most of it would have been built before Elon Musk went into business(s).
That collapses your entire argument.
@@kd7bwb12 ummm when you want to put tunnels under every major city full of the cars you made it becomes a little less ridiculous.
Just that musk is a late detractor to the idea of lrt collapses nothing
@@kansascityshuffle8526
First, Elon Musk doesn’t say that, and doesn’t want put regular cars in tunnels.
Even I have serious concerns about Hyperloop, and so far it doesn’t even work as a technology.
It’s a train system moved by vacuum inside a tube.
--
But even then, a private project by a private company (which has a history of successfully making launch-able rockets and building private electric cars), is infinitely better than spending $9-billion dollars stolen from taxpayers, in order to build a hi-speed light rail to exactly no-where.
This boils down to private industry wins, socialist California government loses.
Thank you for the video.
hype going around in a loop ^_^
ROFL you made my day!!
I know what I need for our christmas tree. these colors are dope.
It turned out to be a distraction by a car company owner to slow down real train projects.
So, a fully realized hyperloop in a hard vacuum could potentially hit orbital velocities, but could you imagine the destruction if leakage or collapse caused a collision in a metro area at that speed?
Which is why Hyperloop isn't using a "hard vacuum". The low pressure would be similar to what high altitude planes fly in. Any transport system has the potential to fail catastrophically, but we design to avoid that.
@@chrismuir8403 Aye, and I'm aware of this. Just interesting to think about.
In my layman's opinion, even if all the technical hurdels can be overcome, I still do not think that a hyperloop would be economically viable compared to flying in a metal tube 10-20 km above ground or a high-speed train. The vactrain needs an extensive infrastructure and the maintainence thereof to everwhere it is planned to go. A plane only needs the airstrip.
But I don't think the technical problems can be solved to the point to even make the vactrain a possibel competitor in personal transportation in the first place. Even the idea of using the upcoming starship as an intercontinental passanger transport, as wacko as it is, is more realistic than the hyperloop, imo.
Planes are just more "flexible". You can change course, you don't need Highest-Tech infrastructure, you can sell a plane, you can rent a plane....
@@martinm.1967 Hyperloop is idiotic.
Using the starship as earth transport is more of a logistical nightmare then the Hyperloop. Look up Adam Something's video about the intercontinental starship he talks about how the pads would have to be offshore miles away from any city in the ocean and take a 45 minute ferry to get to the pad to begin with. I agree though, even if all the technical hurdles are met for vacuum trains where will the lines go and whom will such a system serve the most? I don't think every day people are going to get on a vac train it's most likely Elon just wanting a private shuttle wide enough for a pod for just himself and 2 friends to wiz past LA traffic in a private tube.
Thanks!
Extremely well explained… thank you.
The Hyperloop is a great example of Elon Musk's godly powers of grifting. The idea is over 100 years old, he recycled it a bit, made some nice renders, and now everyone thinks it was his idea. And how nice of him to make this 100 years old idea he did not have open source!
LOL
well, people love to be taken.
How could he open source an idea that isn't closed, no one has the rights to it.
Musk isn't even doing it, he's involved in many things but he's not involved in any Hyperloops atm.
He threw an idea out and others ran with it, big deal he's not investing in it or receiving money for it, so how would that be a grift. If it is he's not very good at it seeing as several other companies and countries have invested millions into the idea.
A small number of people have a really weird reaction to practically everything he does, on one side you have people who support everything he does or says, they will think the Hyperloop is an amazing idea, it's clearly a terrible idea and simply makes very little sense. Which is probably why Musk hasn't put money into it.
Then you have the opposite group who foam at the mouth and call everything he does a "grift" without really understanding what that term means.
Yes Hyperloop isn't a good or financially viable project. So what he was wrong he threw an idea out there.
He wasn't wrong on landing rockets or electric cars. That's 2 pretty gigantic success's.
He's probably the type that just has ideas all the time some will be good some will be bad.
That doesn't make him a grifter lol
@@deepwinter77 how the hell is tesla worth 10x as much as than ford then? lmaoo he is such a grifter, and he can get away with it because he has a steve jobs'-esque "reality distortion field"
I remember being a young kid and imaging these trains levitating on magnets decades ago!
So it's not exactly high level thinking.
Once you grow up you realize why it's much more complicated, especially when it comes to accidents and safety precautions
I love your sense of humor, esp. toward British measurements!
People like Musk, and governments love the idea of spending others' money on huge projects.
I love this channel. I am an entertainer. After my shows during my long drives is when I listen to this podcast the most. I find it all fascinating. Science is a wonderful thing! Thank you for making this channel!