The innovative "Hyperloop" transport system is designed to carry passengers at speeds of up to 1,200 kilometres per hour. Students from the University of Oldenburg and Emden/Leer University of Applied Sciences entered their prototype in the "Hyperloop Pod Competition II" organised by SpaceX founder and Tesla boss Elon Musk at the weekend. In the end, they narrowly missed out on reaching the final in Hawthorne, California - but they won the innovation prize as one of a total of four awards presented. The organisers, SpaceX, used the award to honour the sophisticated braking control system of the self-developed magnetic levitation capsule. The team had previously been thwarted in the competition by technical difficulties on the test track.
"The university and the region can be proud of the success of our students," explains Prof Dr Martin Holthaus, Vice President for Research and Transfer at the University of Oldenburg. "The international competition was a major technical and organisational challenge. The team performed brilliantly." Above all, the intensive cooperation between the students from both universities from different disciplines and the consistent realisation of original ideas made the good result in the competition possible.
Prof Dr Gerhard Kreutz, President of Emden/Leer University of Applied Sciences: "Developing technical innovations for the future is one of the most demanding challenges for engineers. Competitions such as the Hyperloop Competition are ideally suited to testing the latest concepts and thus revolutionising mobility. I congratulate the joint team from the University of Oldenburg and Emden/Leer University of Applied Sciences on their fantastic achievement."
The students themselves and their supervisors, Prof. Dr Walter Neu and Prof. Dr Thomas Schüning, also rated their participation as a great success: their pod had passed all the important technical tests on the days leading up to the final on Sunday without any problems. They were one of the seven teams that were admitted to the final test run out of the original 24 competitors. Here, the prototypes were to start at normal pressure in the vacuum tube in order to qualify for the final. However, the North German HyperpodX team was unable to complete this final test due to technical difficulties with SpaceX's so-called "pusher". Bad luck for the students, who were therefore not allowed to take part in the final race for safety reasons. The race for the fastest vehicle in the vacuum tube was ultimately won by the team from the Technical University of Munich: Their capsule reached a speed of 324 kilometres per hour.
The idea for a fast and environmentally friendly train in a vacuum tube came from SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is also the boss of electric car manufacturer Tesla. In the final round of the competition, the students from Emden and Oldenburg competed against teams from universities all over the world, including top international universities such as ETH Zurich and the University of California.
