The Hyperloop: BUSTED!

in this video we'll take a look at the Hyperloop the brand new method of transport brought forth by the entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk but it would be for for a fifth mode of transport I have a name for the neighbor which is called the Hyperloop how I live ever lived yeah the system is proposed to travel at an average speed of 900 kilometers an hour and at a top speed of 1220 kilometers now it's very similar to an airplane on high altitudes you have a low-pressure environment inside the tube a capsule that doesn't touch anywhere hovers and then because of the low pressure doesn't encounter a lot of resistance it's also a lot faster you can basically get from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in 30 minutes it's also extremely energy-efficient due to solar power utilization in fact the Hyperloop could generate more power than it consumes as a closed system as you generate more power than you then you're consumed in the system it's also much cheaper to build it's about one-tenth the cost of the proposed California high-speed railway system this means that tickets could cost as little as $25 a thousand kilometers per hour in a vacuum tube for less than the construction costs of what is currently proposed for the high-speed rail connection it will generate more power than it uses by solar panels and a ticket will only cost about 20 bucks eeya and it's complete [ __ ] now I'm sure the principal is fine it's just not viable in practice you know it's like the solar roadways thing it sounds great but in reality it's just [ __ ] made up by snake oil salesmen or they mindlessly optimistic daydreaming of those uses term one that better taste of reality the first real challenge is simply the may impossible goal of building a 600 kilometer long vacuum chamber I mean even in a smaller version of the Hyperloop which I could only just about stand up in so it's about two meters in diameter which there's a cross-section of about three meters squared and if it's 600 kilometers long at six hundred thousand meters long I mean the volume will be about two million cubic meters so let's compare that to the world's largest vacuum chamber shall we which is about one fiftieth of the volume this is massive space power facility near Cleveland Ohio and it is the world's biggest vacuum chamber it's used to test spacecraft in the conditions of outer space yeah that's the vacuum chamber that nASA uses to test their spacecraft in and it's 50 times smaller than the smaller version of the Hyperloop it's used to test spacecraft in the conditions of outer space and it does that by pumping out the 30 tons of air in this chamber until they're about 2 grams left now it's a problem with making vacuum chambers that size in the first is they need to be quite heavy in construction aluminium is not the best thing the strongest material to build a vacuum chamber out of so they built out a concrete skin so this thing can take the force that's present on the outside when it's pumped out to the conditions of outer space because there's a lot of atmosphere pushing on the outside about 10 tons per square meter so to help you visualize it here I have a square meter so Emma's Varick pressure is equal to about 10 meters of water so it's like 10 times this distance here so if I were to put 10 meters on top of my one square meter a cubic meter of water weighs about a ton so 10 cubic meters pushing down on one square meter would give you a pressure of 10 tons pushing down on this square meter because there's a lot of atmosphere pushing on the outside about 10 tons per square meter and there is absolutely nothing pushing on the inside because it's a vacuum and it also has to take the vibrational force of a 15-ton capsule going through it at nearly the speed of sound so the walls are about 2 centimeters thick about a intro's up cool so we can now do the calculations to just the steel required had to make only the tube in this structure and it turns out to be about the same mass as the steel in the World Trade Center which to be fair was a ginormous building gulp so that would give us the steel to make the tube then comes the first real problem which is expansion most people know that if you just have say bridges you need an expansion joint in them so let's take a look at the expansion for steel it's about thirteen parts per million per degree Celsius so let's say the temperature range is going to be between freezing point and 40 degrees Celsius that's basically a hot day which means the overall length of this tubes can a very bad out for 500 parts per million that sort of thing which means that the overall length of the Hyperloop from the coldest day to the hottest day will vary by about 300 meters apart the length of three football fields clearly expansion joint and necessary well that would be easy if you're looking at the expansion joints on a bridge not so much if they're an expansion joint for a vacuum tube because it's got to hold that vacuum almost perfectly whilst it's changing its length so let's give them something reasonable like a hundred meter segment of tubing so the expansion difference between ups our hot day on a cold day there would be about 50 millimetres a couple of inches so you would need a joint about every 1/10 of a kilometer such that in the 600 kilometer Hyperloop you would need about six thousand moving part vacuum seals and a failure on any one of them could be disastrous for the people inside the Hyperloop and this is of course assuming 100 meter segments of tubing their current segments look to be more like a 10 meters or so which would mean they would need 60,000 moving part vacuum seals on a 2 meter diameter tube I mean the only thing even remotely comparable in the world is the Large Hadron Collider which is now maybe 50 kilometers or so of tubing albeit underground so they're more or less a constant temperature so they really don't have these brancion problems and even at that its 100th of the volume of the Hyperloop it doesn't have a 15-ton capsule going through it and while it does have a large number of seals to it for the large part they won't be moving part seals they'll just be static seals that all you have to do is tighten up the bolts and you're done so how do they address this in their white paper which is to go to documentation for the Hyperloop a telescopic tube similar to the boxy ones used to access airplanes at airports would be needed at the end station to address the cumulative length change of the tube now that just blew my mind because that really does sound like they just intend to weld all of the tubes together that is they haven't done even the simplest expansion calculations now sure well the tubes would be great for holding the vacuum but it does mean that your stations can I have to move pipe out three football pitches between the hottest and coldest day this station is probably the most compact station and it's really the entire activity actually happens almost here this is more still of a lounge shopping area we have your magazine and your car feel everything happens on a goal not to mention how you expect the support pylons to hold all of this up and account for that movement plus if you're just going to weld all these tubes together you're going to get massive buckling problems painted white or not in a hard Californian Sun the top of these things will get hotter than the bottom that it's the top will expand more than the bottom and with a 500-mile long tube you're going to get massive buckling problems of the sort that you would get on a bimetallic strip the brass should expand more than the steel the bimetallic strip should bend before the steel side your alternative wage probably has a better chance of working is the 6000 vacuums heels although I've got to be honest vacuum seals on a 2 meter diameter tube speaking of son of his decades of experience working with vacuums I really don't rate your chances of that either so why is this thing running in the vacuum anyway well that's easy you cut down on the air resistance and this is the main reason why airplanes fly so high is because the atmosphere gets thinner the higher you get there's less air resistance however there is a compromise that your engines need that air to burn the fuel and create thrust so you can't go too high otherwise your engines run out of oxygen however there's another problem people also need air to live so if there's any rupture in the Hyperloop capsule for any reason whatsoever you will die in the Hyperloop in pretty much exactly the same way that you would die in deep space you know it's at times like this when I'm stuck in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young why would she tell you I don't know I didn't listen and of course people won't be able to hear you call for help cuz as alien informed us in space no one can hear you scream and that's essentially what the Hyperloop is doing it's bringing all the impracticality of space trouble down to the surface of the earth and putting them inside a capsule traveling about the speed of sound in a giant gun barrel so another one of the key problems is what happens when something goes wrong if you're traveling about a thousand kilometers per hour the speed of sound in a capsule within centimeters with your inch or so of a tube the velocity of the capsule is about that of a bullet fired from a gun except it's a 15-ton bullet any failure whatsoever will rip through that 2 centimeter altitude like candy now sure anyone in that capsule will die pretty much instantly in the event of a crash but then again a car crash at 50 miles an hour probably do that for you the problem then comes that a single breach in the Hyperloop will probably kill everyone else in the Hyperloop you see once you breach the outside tube air will rush into the tube at about the speed of sound roughly this is how it works the speed of sound is mostly determined by how quickly air molecules can actually knock into each other which is basically how quickly the molecules are going when they're moving into a vacuum of course there's nothing to stop them so the air rushes into the vacuum basically at the speed of sound yeah that will destroy any capsule it hits and probably cause a cascade failure I mean ballpark numbers there's a vacuum inside the tube so the gas rushing into it is a pressure differential of one atmosphere so what's it like getting hit by a pressure differential of one atmosphere well let's take a look at it this way atmospheric pressure is about 10 tons per meter squared about the size of a reasonable truck and that one atmosphere pressure wave coming down the tube towards you is coming towards you at about the speed of sound the only redeeming feature here is the air gas is pretty compressible stuff but you can still expect it to kill pretty much anything it hits meaning it a rough idea of what a 1 atmosphere pressure wave will do from some nuke benchmarking tests blasts from air burst where overpressure exceeds 10 psi can cause substantial damage to destroyer type ships above 14 psi it could even result in hole rupture flooding and sinking the shock imparted by blast to the superstructure to damage or carry away equipment at greater distances overpressure above 6 psi can distort rupture and carry away light structures and equipment interior equipment and compartments may be damaged by the blast collapsing deck structures or bulkheads overpressure entering through openings can damage boilers blast injuries to expose personnel represented by this dummy is usually severe over 3 psi here it was 6 PS I well one of the methods by which they're going to power this is by a giant turbine on the front of the capsule which is great apart from their running in a near-perfect vacuum which means that engine will have to spin astronomically fast faster than it would if it was a terrestrial engine designed to run in a thick atmosphere engine is roaring along at full throttle the blades spin at almost 3,000 revolutions per minute the centrifugal force of the tip of each blade is equivalent to the weight of a hundred and ten town locomotive meet damn our plane engines which are designed to run at about 30,000 feet about ten kilometers run on about 1/5 of an atmosphere of pressure that's 200 times higher than the pressure in the Hyperloop now in the Hyperloop of course you had 200 times less pressure than that which is great that means you get 200 times less drag on your capsule it the downside of course is that your turbine will produce 200 times less thrust by actually spinning in that atmosphere than if it was a turbine spinning at about the altitude that a cruising jet flies at now it's a problem with big objects spinning that fast that's they tend to structurally fail just from the g-forces alone but even if they don't object spinning that fast contain a lot of energy up to full speed now it takes 6 seconds it and deadly when you now that's not a problem as long as your bearings are good and everything is balanced see it seems not only bounce however if everything is not balanced if say for instance this is a pocket of high-pressure air but someone shot a few holes in the hyper loop then the turbine is all of a sudden going from running at 1,000 of an atmosphere to hitting a pocket of air a 1/10 of an amis there is it going to have a hundred times the force acting on it which is the sort of thing that causes blade failure so let's imagine a tube failure now it's expected that that will also break any power connections that the vehicle has so it's now only got its batteries well what about the people trapped inside this 600 kilometer long steel tube well there's a wall for air traveling down towards them at about the speed of sound essentially a shock wave and it will kill everyone in the capsule when it hits them the only option is to put on the brakes the emergency brakes now of course you have to hope that the emergency brakes are good enough and the capsules strong enough to survive being hit by that one atmosphere pressure way and honestly I've got my doubts about that because these capsules are designed to run at one thousandth of an atmosphere I have a limited faith of the Ming structurally strong enough to survive being hit by a one atmosphere pressure way traveling at about the speed of sound but let's just say for the sake of argument that you survive you are now trapped inside a 600 kilometer tube in a sealed capsule which you cannot get out of and when the air in that capsule runs out or more specifically when the carbon dioxide builds up enough you're going to die and how are you going to rescue people inside the 600 kilometer long metal tube look the whole thrust system relies on being able to get decent compression off a gas which is almost at space type pressures one thousandth of an atmosphere I mean he'll Webb thrust here is basically provided by a turbo molecular pump because that's almost the only sort of thing that's going to be able to compress gas that's essentially space I mean it's a neat idea except those things typically fairly small and run at 20,000 rpm that's spinning ten times faster than the turbine blades on a plank engine is roaring along at full throttle the blades spin at almost 3,000 revolutions per minute I mean blades it wouldn't just play 100 tons per piece the centrifugal force at the tip of each blade is equivalent to the weight of a hundred and ten town locomotive it'll be more like a thousand tons yeah which is probably one of the reasons why you don't find large-scale turbo molecular pumps and even if you could it's doubtful if they would failsafe if a loose object just got thrown up from the track or or someone just shot some holes in the hyper loop or something I mean the whole thing is just mind-blowing the optimistic your capsules here going through the tunnel basically the speed of sound if they get hit by any loose object that's essentially the equivalent of the static capsule being shot with a gun and what happens in the event of a catastrophic decompression oh they're just gonna repress rice the whole tube really it's just that easy you're going to let 2,000 tons of air into the tube before anyone succumbs to the effect of being subjected to a vacuum that is basically the equivalent of space and that's to say nothing of the emergency deceleration problems you know you're traveling at almost the speed of sound you repressurize the tube you will be lightly pulling reentry type g-forces so what that's going to be tens of thousands of large-scale vents along the whole length of the tube for an emergency repressurization thousands more things that can go wrong with the system the hyper loops biggest problem making tube travel comfortable so this is kind of like the Hyperloop think tank design Center right now then of course once it's already pressurized all these 15 ton capsules will be able to drive themselves on regular wheels to an emergency exit what are these models over here so we have two sets of models the first ones here the back they were really study models that were investigating these are more of a finished product that investigate more of the interior situation and also the sitting so these are all the options of the capsules well what does that emergency exit look like well no one really knows because they're not even mastered the relatively simple stuff like say for instance constructing a 600 kilometer long vacuum pipeline I mean shut the Hyperloop is a great idea just as long as you ignore all the practicalities of actually building it I mean just in the event of a large-scale tube failure just let's just say they have an emergency stop on one of the capsules they're saying that they're getting a capsule leaving every two minutes on a 30 minute trip so there's going to be about 15 capsules in a hole in the tube that's a capsule about every 40 kilometers or so now I imagine one of these capsules ruptures the outside tube by the time the shock wave reaches the next capsule it'll be a column of air of about forty kilometers in length it'll be moving at about the speed of sound and that column of air will weigh about 100 tons and it's going to be hitting capsule that weighs 15 tons I mean what I did my vacuum for each experiment my metal ball had a much higher mass than the air entering the tube this is going to be our mini 100th scale Hyperloop and there's a little metal ball in there so now she's assuming a little metal pole okay so there's a little metal ball in mini Hyperloop so this is what it looks like formed at 1,000 frames per second and this you can see this is really quite a formidable acceleration there and bear in mind this is a tiny diameter tube over a short distance about half a meter the air had about one hundredth of the mass of the ball it was pushing and this was the effect I mean what you would be likely getting in the actual Hyperloop is something more along the lines of the Mythbusters experiment where the air filling the vacuum tube had a mass much larger than the object it was pushing a ping-pong ball in this case so now we're pumping it down three two one whoa but more importantly let's take a peek at that can this wonderful hole is now so this hit it with with five hundred miles an hour coming out of this and yet they managed to fire that ping-pong ball at almost the speed of sound which is more or less what you would expect to happen to these capsules in the event of a large-scale tube failure you see with planes you can make many of the same argument however if the planes hull is breached first of all you're only 0.2 of an atmosphere and on top of that there is an emergency air supply which will allow the pilot to fly down to more breathable altitude while if an engine fails he still has others to fly and if there is vibrations or turbulence of some sort it's not a big deal because there's a lot of space to fly into it's not like if he goes off course by a couple of centimeters or an inch or something that it will destroy the plane and kill everyone on it and destroy every other plane flying that route you see planes over the years have been designed such that a single point failure is not catastrophic planes of course cost a lot of money but they're fairly easy defensible vehicles now when they're near to the ground of course they can be shot at but once in the air they very quickly go beyond the range of all but the high end military weapons that's something that's simply not the case with the Hyperloop it's 600 kilometers long and it runs down the middle of a freeway it's indefensible any crazy with an anti-materiel rifle could shoot holes in the tube something which would probably be fatal to almost the whole system but maybe most importantly one plane crash does not destroy the entire infrastructure and kill everyone else flying the same route look the whole deal with a Hyperloop is it's only really efficient over shorter distances just as a side note for distance as longer than that it's actually more economically viable to use a supersonic jet that is where you can get on and off it quickly you know so it's one of those things you don't have all of that long security at airport but once you get beyond about 500 kilometers it becomes much more efficient to fly because planes don't require 10 million dollar per mile tube to run it however in reality the destruction of a single 15 tonne capsule traveling at about a thousand kilometers per hour on the tube would rupture the tube and lightly be fatal to everyone else in the Hyperloop practically what this means is you will probably need as much security for Hyperloop trouble as you would for air trouble it's also a lot faster you can basically get from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in 30 minutes which in reality means that we'll probably be no more time advantages for using the Hyperloop overflying add to this the most folks seem to have forgotten a zero the end of their budget you know they're estimating is going to cost our man six billion dollars or something it's also much cheaper to build it's about one-tenth the cost of the proposed California high-speed railway system Berkeley guy reckons 100 billion which is comparable to the cost of a maglev railway of comparable length that they are currently building in Japan which sure it only goes about half the speed of the Hyperloop but then again it doesn't have all the disadvantages of space travel it had gun bow and their reckoning of recovering the Hyperloop infrastructure cost in about 20 years assumed there were no running costs no maintenance no infrastructure inspection repair or energy costs so let's just maybe be a little more realistic here and say that they're $25 ticket become something of a more plausible like $250 and they're 30-minute journey time what we're getting to the actual station and getting through security becomes something more sensible like a now one and a half hours in reality it's probably going to cost about as much as a plane ticket it's going to take about as long as a plane turn do you feel like you're working on a project that's really going to change the future oh absolutely if I have a date and I want to see the Opera in San Francisco I can literally do that and be back in time to go to sleep in my own house plus the added advantage of enjoying all the dangers of space trouble in fact Californian desert so yeah the hype of the Hyperloop of which there is plenty even if you ignore all the Scambler stuff about tripling the pay of a PR executive to almost half a million dollars per year while dating her then firing her when the engagement was broken off yeah if you ignore that yeah half a million dollar salary PR executives no wonder they built an entire stage and got wall-to-wall publicity we are standing on hard ground this is a significant moment for us for what was in reality just a maglev train traveling a couple of hundred meters five four three two one seriously dude your countdown was longer than your Mac left Ranger five-four-three-two-one you think of Hyperloop you think maybe this is going to happen years from now it's gonna happen much quicker than anyone imagines Wow a maglev train that constitutes the ER for the successful test of the Hyperloop it's also extremely energy efficient due to solar power utilization in fact the Hyperloop could generate more power than it consumes as a closed system as you generate more power than you when you're consumed in the system oh by the way folks any transport system could become energy self-sufficient if you put solar panels over the top of it you don't need your railway to run in a vacuum tube to make that happen

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 1,920,913

Rating: 3.9824748 out of 5

Keywords: hyperloop, busted, fail, death, kill, vacuum, failure, you, hyperloopone, one, thunderf00t, phil mason, science, physics, engineering, pump, tube, glass, shatter, break, boom, pressure, depressurisation, gas, ball, bearing, fired, gun, space, hyper, loop, elon, musk, scam, transport, la, sf, los angles, san fransico, california, liberal, green, energy, cheap, travel, train, plane, billionaire, dumb, stupid, 30 mins, air, worlds, largest, lhc, scandal, nuke, nuclear, test, mythbusters

Id: RNFesa01llk

Length: 28min 39sec (1719 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Rhaedas]

When he began discussing expansion and seals, he seems to want to compare it to massive structures, and focus on overall changes and demands, but the numbers at an individual cylinder doesn't reflect that. Now I don't know the latest designs out there, but welding the whole thing together feels like a strawman, it just wouldn't make sense to do that for a number of reasons, but that's what he's using for big numbers that fail.

Also, there was criticism of his previous video on how catastrophic failure would occur because it wasn't comparable to a full scale tube and pod. He makes no mention of possible safeguards in airlocks or other emergency systems, instead using the scary idea of a wall of air shooting down the tube with the pods unable to escape. See his other video, he relies there on dramatics to make his fallacy seem a problem.

He seems to not understand the purpose begin the turbine in front of the original design, saying that it would have to run at huge speeds to take in enough molecules from the partial vacuum. But that's not meant to drive the pod, but to move remaining air past the pod.

His argument on security is based on his arguments that a single accident can kill everyone in the whole tube or destroy/shut down the whole thing. Again, no mention of possible systems to minimize or prevent that.

I don't mind bringing up problems with the whole concept, that's one reason why it was put out there. But his videos are slanted to his opinion of it being not viable and don't offer any solutions or alternatives to them. Plus the hyperbole is a bit much because of this superiority take on things. The title and his opening words both suggest that anyone working on the hyperloop concept is trying to pull one over on everyone else.

It's not a discussion on specifics, it's a few strawmen and preconceived notions based on the basic original design which was meant as a starting point, not a final product.

[u/vasilenko93]

Damn it.

[u/hwillis]

1st 5 minutes and most of the video are random comparisons to make it sound harder than it is. His thing with the plexiglass is particularly dumb, when in reality building an airplane has the exact same challenges. His bullshit with air going the speed of sound doesn't happen when planes lose integrity. Then he makes engines that already exist sound like they don't, and shows a clip from battlebots to prove this. GOOFY.

Heat expansion is an issue, but he hasn't done his research enough. First, the air in the tube is gonna be basically climate controlled since air will be pumped out constantly. That limits expansion straight off. Second the expansion he's talking about happens once every 6 months, so a huge complicated system is fine to account for it. Third the tube floats on the pylons, and can potentially move into a slightly less straight shape to reduce the expansion. Fourth there are tons of ways to control heat expansion, like accordian tube with a liner inside.

He makes such a huge deal of vaccuum systems being hard to seal when it is nearly irrelephant. Moving seals are incredibly simple in low vacuums. Polymer(O-ring) seals can handle the pressure easily, are incredibly cheap, and their leakage is super easy to compensate for with a small pump. I think he was a lab tech or something, but I doubt he knows much about it.

His second big point is that if someone blows the tube up, everyone in the tube will die. Whether or not that's true its irrelevant. The hyperloop is not a better target than a stadium.

His third point is that hyperloop will probably not be cheaper than rail. That's probably true. The land acquisition cost is predicated on highway land travel. Then he goes and compares the numbers to the worst numbers in the world, America and the Japanese maglev. Actual Japanese rail costs about the same as hyperloop's estimation. The numbers are not insane, and while personally I think they are probably off by at least 2x from what's possible, its definitely not 10x. American rail is essentially corporations gutting taxpayers, and the Japanese maglev has hundreds of miles of coils in the rail. It's far more complicated than a hyperloop.

He closes with a snarky comment about putting solar panels on top of anything. Hyperloop has a top, train tracks do not.

[u/shitilostagain]

OK just a few thoughts:

1. Wouldn't the pods travelling away from the rupture point be okay as long as they are moving as they are travelling at or above the speed of sound and the air wall couldn't catch up to them? When they get to the station is a whole different issue, but there are ways to add valves and control mechanisms to stop/slow the air before they get to the station, especially if the pods are traveling faster than the wall of air. however, the pods coming at the wall of air are probably going to be toast, and there may be no practical way around that.

2. Couldn't you solve the temperature differential and the need for vacuum tubes by putting the whole tube in a temperature controlled underground system, thereby eliminating the expansion and sun baking problem? It could also prevent against outside attacks, as any trespassing onto the space above the hyperloop could be monitored.

3. As for the turbine approach, wouldn't using a maglev system inside the tube solve that?

I'm not saying that the project is necessarily realistic and its goals are achievable, but with some thought, it may become a bit more plausible, if it is even that possible at the moment.

[u/tkulogo]

Oh, hyperloop might be hard to make... we better give up right away.

[u/Blake7160]

When so called expert scientists tell you something is possible, they're probably right.

If other so called experts tell you its most definitely impossible. .. they're probably wrong .

Anyone remember when mass produced electric cars were never going to happen? Or how about the well known fact that heavier than air flying machines would never work? Or maybe you recall when any train travelling faster than 90mph would rip it's passengers apart?

[u/Mentioned_Videos]

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(1) 50 BMG vs 1 Inch Mild Steel FARMAGEDDON (2) 50 Cal vs Steel Plate	2 - You are incorrect. The bullet will either penetrate cleanly or cause a small dent. Regardless, a very large hole is required to compromise the tube, which is actually relatively thick. Even a large dent will not be enough. also note the plate bei...
Elon Musk talks Hyperloop: Thermal Expansion	1 - 1st 5 minutes and most of the video are random comparisons to make it sound harder than it is. His thing with the plexiglass is particularly dumb, when in reality building an airplane has the exact same challenges. His bullshit with air going the s...
Railroad tank car vacuum implosion	1 - Easy, once the cylindrical shape of the tube is compromised, it collapses. At the pressure the whitepaper gives, the tube is likely to tear as it collapses leading to an increased flow rate.

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[u/Ducky118]

I tried posting this here but you beat me to it! I've posted it on the Elon Musk subreddit also. The SpaceX page doesn't deem it as relevant.