Student teams from all over the world developed transport capsules or "pods" for Elon Musk's Hyperloop vision: the Tesla founder is seeking to create a transport system in which people and goods travel through vacuum tubes at over 1,000 kilometres per hour.
After their Pod “Mujinga” had passed the first tests very successfully, the Swissloop team missed being amongst the finalists. One of the inverters suffered a failure during a vacuum chamber test at SpaceX. This caused their high-power batteries to be short-circuited. Despite extensive efforts to fix them, the internal cells remain damaged. In the long term, the students are aiming to use Hyperloop technology to revolutionise freight transport in Switzerland. They envision deploying a form of modern pneumatic tube to transport packages a great deal faster and in a more eco-friendly way than at present. This would be achieved via a nationwide underground Hyperloop network. (Excerpt from ETH News)
Team participant Yannick Strümpler provided us with first hand pictures from the behind the scenes of the competition in LA!
