A prototype for transport of tomorrow?
Waterloop’s a little loopy, but glitches don’t upset UW team
WATERLOO — Their groundbreaking technology has yet to work when it counts. But enthusiasm is undimmed at the University of Waterloo, where students hope to help change the way we get around.
Friday, a team of students unveiled Goose II, the scaleddown prototype for a train that’s meant to shoot passengers through a low-friction, low-atmosphere tube at speeds beyond 1,000 km/h.
The public demonstration faltered. Unveiled after a long delay, the vehicle creaked and inched along a rail and then stopped. It’s not the first glitch.
Students took an earlier model to an international competition in January but pulled it before the race, knowing it was not ready to compete.
There’s a second international competition next month in California. The updated Goose II has yet to qualify for the onemile race. It may only appear in a showcase.
Still, there’s a lot of learning going on. That’s a big part of the project dubbed Waterloop. UW is the only Canadian team in the competition to design a hyperloop prototype, a fantastic-sounding venture pitched by entrepreneur billionaire Elon Musk, builder of Tesla electric cars and SpaceX rockets.
More than 50 students from all faculties are involved in the Waterloop project, which has received more than $50,000 in Crowdfunding, sponsorships and faculty donations.
“All of us are experiencing innovation in real time,” UW vice-president Sandra Banks said as students struggled Friday to demonstrate their prototype.
Musk’s hyperloop transportation vision has attracted skepticism, but also investment from startup technology firms and government attention. Musk said this week he has “verbal government approval” to build a tunnel for high-speed transportation from New York to Washington that could break ground by the end of this year.
Engineering graduate student Victor Qian, 24, doesn’t see it as science fiction.
“This is totally practical,” said Quian, engineering lead for Waterloop. “We already know all the science that’s involved.” The challenge as he sees it is to make hyperloop technology affordable and commercially viable.
“It’s cutting-edge and it has a real, definite potential to make people’s lives better,” he said. “I’m using my engineering skills to directly create things that will benefit people.”
He sees setbacks as part of the learning process, because failing can be as important as succeeding.
“When I first joined this project, I really thought that this was just out-of-the-world and that there’s no way we can do this,” said Jason Pan, 18, environment and business student, administrative lead for Waterloop.
He’s come around after watching engineers do amazing work. “I realized that this is a lot closer than we expected,” he said.
Faculty adviser Serhiy Yarusevych, an engineering professor, is less skeptical about hyperloop prospects than he was two years ago when students asked him to help.
“What was a far-fetched goal two years ago when we started is now much closer to reality,” he said, citing prototypes that are being built.
Still he doubts that we’ll see passengers shot through low atmosphere tubes any time soon in Canada. “How far from reality is it here? I think quite far,” he said, citing the high cost, risk factors and public attitudes.
“A lot of people prefer being able to see outside a window,” he said. “Being encased in a tube is not necessarily the most pleasant … environment for travel, unless the tube is transparent. But that presents certain challenges for manufacturing.”