Seattle to Portland in 15 minutes: UW students design future of travel

SEATTLE — A team of University of Washington students are about to go to California in the final phase of a competition to build a hyperloop pod.

The competition, hosted by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, started with 1,200 teams around the world. The UW Hyperloop team has now made it to the final 30.

Their task is to design a safe and fast pod that would carry people through a near-vacuum chamber.

One year ago, the team was awarded for presenting a design for the safest pod.

“You’re in a near-vacuum tube, and so decompression – if something happens with the pod, there’s no air in the entire tube. And so how do you allow people to breathe safely? Similar issues that planes have,” said David Coven, one of the directors of the UW Hyperloop team.

Coven said the team also has to consider impacts at high speeds and ensuring the pod doesn’t break.

The test pod for the competition would run close to 200 miles per hour, but the eventual hyperloop built for commercial use would run more than 700 miles per hour.

“Imagine an air hockey table turned upside down, and you’re going 700 miles an hour,” said Malachi Williams, another director of the hyperloop team. “Similar to a jet engine, you have a compressor, and that allows you to suck in air, and you blow it out through the bottom.”

Max Pfeiffer, a student engineer on the project, showed KIRO 7 a prototype they use in their South Lake Union lab space, sponsored by GloCal Composites.

The team asked the SpaceX competition hosts for a short piece of the steel track to bring back to Seattle for them to practice. The actual test track for the competition will be about a mile long.

They will run their pods on both an open-air track and a vacuum chamber.

Coven said a commercial project of building a hyperloop and its pods from San Francisco to Los Angeles is estimated to cost $8 billion to $9 billion. An individual ticket for someone to travel that distance would be about $20.

He said that hyperloop travel like this works best when the track is in a straight line and goes no farther than 900 miles. Beyond that distance, it is more cost effective to fly.

When thinking about the fact that Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair featured a futuristic monorail as the transportation of tomorrow, Coven said, “It’s just so cool to wake up and think of us, building the new age of transportation.”

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