Over the next two months, 25 students from premier colleges will put their heads together here to build their idea of the pod, a vehicle that would meet high speed norms of the futuristic transport system Hyperloop.
The Pod Design Competition to be held in August at Hawthorne, California by the company SpaceX, is the second in the current year. The idea is to have a scaled-down pod prototype that can traverse a one mile long evacuated tube in a vacuum and seat only one passenger.
The core committee of the team, mostly engineering and management students, launched work on Monday, hosted by Bengaluru-based fabrication facility, Workbench Projects.
Hyperloop India, the only team in the country to reach the final design stage, will build the OrcaPod, a prototype for speeds of up to 460 km per hour. The Hyperloop system is proposed by inventor-businessman Elon Musk of SpaceX. The concept envisages a pod-like vehicle being propelled through an evacuated tube, under reduced pressure in vacuum-like conditions.
August 1 deadline
“They are geared to meet the tough deadline of two months to build the Orcapod. It has to be ready by August 1,” said Anupama Gowda, co-founder, Workbench Projects. Over the next week, team members have to find a place to stay and convince possible sponsors. Also on the cards are meetings with industries and associations,” said Sibesh Kar, team lead and founder of Hyperloop India. He is enrolled at BITS Pilani for an MSc in Physics as well as a B.E. Mechanical Engineering degree.
The budget requirement of ₹75 lakh is high. “We have raised around ₹ 25 lakh so far, and are looking for more sponsors and partners,” Mr. Kar said. The Orcapod, to be built from the ground up near Ulsoor Metro Station, will have engineering and software design specialists. “We will build the understructure including levitation-related parts. The plan is to build a pod at scale and then tune it for competition,” said Dhruv Mahajan, software lead, and B.E. Computer Science student at BITS Goa.
