UC Merced Connect: Students make the cut in Hyperloop design competition
A small team of undergraduate students from UC Merced is gaining major exposure in a global competition to design portions of what could be the next big innovation in transportation.
Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor and co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors, has envisioned the Hyperloop in response to California’s plans for a high-speed rail system. As part of his SpaceX initiative to design, manufacture and launch advanced rockets and spacecraft, Musk started a competition to accelerate the development of the Hyperloop.
The UC Merced Hypercats team – comprising four mechanical engineering students – was one of 1,200 entries from more than 160 universities and private companies, and the team’s emergency brake system design was one of 300 selected from that original pool. The Hypercats’ design has now gotten the team to the third stage of competition.
“We considered some really crazy ideas,” team leader Benjamin H. Bocanegra said. “We thought of rockets, parachutes … but in the end, we came up with a system that uses ‘wings’ on the top of the pod and air flaps on the side to slow the pod to a safe speed for a set of wheels with brake calipers to safely stop the pod.”
The solar-powered Hyperloop system would feature engineless pods traveling 760 mph using near-vacuum inside pressurized smart tubes that sense speed and location. Musk believes the system could transport people much faster and more safely than a traditional rail system, and could cost less than the tens of billions estimated for high-speed rail.
Musk started the Hyperloop design competition to accelerate the development of a functional prototype and to encourage student innovation, and invited universities and private engineering companies from all over the world to submit proposals for passenger-transit pods or subsystems to support the pods.
At the end of January, the UC Merced team travels to Texas A&M University for Design Weekend, where about 100 teams that have made it this far in the contest will present actual models of their designs.
Because the pods would be traveling so fast, “They would be slowed to a stop over about 14 seconds and 3 kilometers to avoid serious injury or death to passengers,” team member Isabella Domi said. “That meant we had to design a very different kind of system.”
The students plan to take 3-D-printed models of their system to Design Weekend, and will have cost analyses as well as computer simulations and calculations to support their proposal. If the team makes it to the next round, their system will be tested on a 1-mile track built by SpaceX in June.
“To see our design come to life? That would be amazing,” team member Salvador Uvalle said.
Rising Star
UC Merced psychology Professor Sarah Depaoli has been recognized as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science (APS), a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of scientific psychology and its representation at the national and international level.
According to the APS, the annual Rising Star designation recognizes “outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their research career whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions.”
Depaoli was nominated by UC Merced Professor Will Shadish, a founding faculty member who is head of the university’s quantitative psychology graduate program. Since Depaoli was hired in 2011, she has published 19 research papers.
Quantitative psychology is a field in which mathematical modeling and statistical analysis are developed and then applied to psychological research. Depaoli’s research incorporates Bayesian statistical methods, which are insightful but require significant computational technology that has only recently become more widely available.
“I am deeply honored to be a recipient of the APS Rising Star award,” Depaoli said. “This recognition of my work on Bayesian statistics means a great deal to me, and it is a privilege to represent UC Merced with this award. The support of the university and my mentors at UC Merced has been incredibly valuable to the success of my program of research.”
UC Merced Connect is a collection of news items written by the University Communications staff. To contact them, email communications@ucmerced.edu.
This story was originally published January 15, 2016 at 2:04 PM with the headline "UC Merced Connect: Students make the cut in Hyperloop design competition."