UC Merced team part of high-speed transportation competition

A team of students from UC Merced has made it into the third round of proposals for projects related to the Hyperloop, a proposed alternative to high-speed rail dreamed up by business magnate Elon Musk.

The UC Merced Hyper Cats, made up of three mechanical engineering students and a recent graduate, will head to Texas A&M University to present their idea during the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition Design Weekend Jan. 29-30. The team is one of about 125 student engineering teams selected from more than 1,000 proposals for the Texas convention.

The Hyperloop project would create a high-speed transportation system using reduced-pressure tubes that would allow capsules to carry passengers on an air cushion much like the puck on an air-hockey table. Musk, the 44-year-old billionaire CEO of Tesla Motors and Space Exploration Technologies, has proposed that the system would travel at twice the speed of a jet while being safer, more reliable and more energy efficient than other forms of transportation.

Some teams invited to the competition are designing a Hyperloop from the ground up, while others are focusing on particular parts of the capsule-carrying tube. The Hyper Cats have designed an emergency-braking system for the capsule, which would move faster than 700 mph.

Salvador Uvalla of Atwater, who graduated in December, explained that the braking system design works in three steps if something like an earthquake were to crack the tube and disrupt the reduced pressure. “In that case, it would fall to the ground and cause a lot of chaos,” the 22-year-old said on Monday.

The emergency braking system would gently stop the capsule by first deploying adjustable “wings” to create lift, then flaps to slow the vessel and wheels to soften the landing. The rapid succession of operations would occur within 13 seconds, stopping the capsule within the space of just over a mile.

The Hyper Cats are getting some recognition for making it this far, said member Huong Phan, 22, of Los Angeles. She said her parents are proud and high schools back home are paying attention. “We made it to the top 100-something, so it was nice to be able to talk about it,” she said.

Benjamin Bocanegra, 23, a senior, said mechanical engineering students have a tight schedule and all of the work put into designing the brakes was done in the students’ free time. A native of Peru, he came to the United States in 2009 before starting at UC Merced in 2011.

The team came back from winter break early and used holidays to work on designs. “We’re not getting paid for this,” he said.

The UC Merced school of engineering is picking up the tab for the team’s trip.

SpaceX has pledged to construct a one-mile test track for use next to its Hawthorne headquarters. Teams will be able to test their human-scale pods during a competition weekend at the track, currently targeted for this summer.

The fourth member of the Hyper Cats, Isabella Domi, said the outcome of this weekend’s competition could be a success if the judges put the Hyper Cats’ system in their top five or if another team brings the Hyper Cats onto their bigger project.

Domi, a 20-year-old junior from San Diego, noted the potential for the Hyperloop. “I think it would have a huge change on how everyone gets around,” she said.

Ashlie Martini, a professor in the school of engineering, said she gave the team advice when they asked for it but they put in all the hard work. When they first came to her with the idea, she said, she was less than optimistic.

“To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure it was going to go forward,” she said. “It’s a big deal to have taken that on and be independent.

“It’s really a huge success that they’ve been invited out there,” she said.

Nobody involved has any reliable way to estimate the Hyper Cats’ chances, but the team said they are hopeful. In the meantime, they’re not pumping the brakes.

“We still have a lot of things to do,” Bocanegra said.

For more on the project and the competition, go to www.spacex.com/hyperloop.

This story was originally published January 25, 2016 at 5:15 PM with the headline "UC Merced team part of high-speed transportation competition."