China’s Hyperloop Hype Train
Image: Hyperloop Belarus
News from China says the Chinese have broken their own, and the global, speed record for magnetically levitating trains, which you might know under the name “hyperloop.” Let’s have a look.
I find news coming out of China generally somewhat difficult to interpret. In this case all we have to go by is an article that appeared in the South China Morning Post. They report that the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, CASIC for short, has made “a significant breakthrough” with its latest test.
There are no further documents to support this supposed breakthrough. But while I don’t have much trust in the Chinese government, I have a huge lot of respect for Chinese scientists and engineers, which is what makes me think it’ll probably be mostly correct. What it means though is a different question.
The new transport system from CASIC is a magnetically levitating train that travels in a vacuum tube. These trains are also known as “maglev”, short for “magnetic levitation”, and yes that is basically what Musk means by hyperloop.
Such transport systems dramatically reduce friction both with the ground or rails and, most importantly with air. The test facility is located in the northern part of China and is for all we know it’s the biggest of its kind with a tunnel of about 2 kilometres length.
Construction on the test facility officially began in April 2022. Last year in the summer they reported having reached 452 kilometres per hour, which made the Chinese maglev the fastest train in the world. In October they said they’d reached 623 kilometers per hour under non-vacuum conditions. They now report that they have exceeded this speed, presumably with some amount of vacuum, but don’t say exactly what speed they’ve reached.
Their goal is to reach 1000 kilometres per hour. Just for comparison, a typical passenger plane flies something like 800 kilometres per hour.
The China Post also says that the test allowed them to check that various components of their technology are working as desired, most importantly the magnets. This is all very good news.
The biggest challenges for those systems are: maintaining the vacuum in long tubes over potentially hundreds of kilometres, and avoiding accelerations. Getting such systems up to speed is no small feat. It isn’t easy to maintain a good vacuum in a tube that long, that needs very precisely shaped parts. And at that high speed even the smallest bump or wiggle could be a disaster.
If you have tubes over long distances and you put them on the surface you will have to cope with the expansion and contraction due to temperature changes. If you put it underground, you have to cope with geological tensions. Both of these are small effects, but at 1000 kilometres an hour even the smallest deformation can be an issue. And the issue is that inside the thing it might get very rough.
Does it make sense to build such a transport system? Well, that depends on how expensive it is. But generally I tend to think if you have a country as large as China it does make sense. Even if you don’t use it to transport people, there’s a lot of stuff you might want to transport that doesn’t care very much about vibrations. Wood, steel, concrete, clothes.
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