Elon Musk, the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, first challenged the engineering community with his 2013 white paper, to develop Hyperloop, a way to safely move people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes, at speeds of up to 760 mph. In June of this year, SpaceX initiated a pod design competition to spur the interest in, and development of, a prototype for the Hyperloop. Texas A&M University has been chosen to host the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Design Weekend scheduled for Jan. 29-30.
Soon after this competition was initiated, engineering students at Texas A&M University learned that Texas A&M would be offering a Hyperloop-themed interdisciplinary senior capstone design course.
At Texas A&M, senior design projects are designed to challenge students by simulating real world engineering challenges they will face in their careers. The Hyperloop, a complex engineering challenge with a simple end result, fits well into this curriculum.
Previous capstone design classes taught by Dr. William Schneider, Zachry Professor of Engineering Practice in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, have typically been NASA specific challenges and required some level of insight that a typical Google search doesn’t provide. Schneider retired as the senior engineer from NASA after a 38-year career that included leading the team tasked with investigating the Space Shuttle Columbia accident, as well as designing equipment currently on the moon. As part of Schneider’s class, students must learn to write a needs statement, generate a function analysis from the needs statement and then combine the two to produce a design that proves they have solved the original problem.
The popularity of the Hyperloop Pod Competition project at Texas A&M allowed for multiple design studio classes to be dedicated to the competition. Mechanical engineering students, along with students from multiple disciplines are participating in the class and have been split into two studios, one led by Schneider and the other by Dr. Andrea Strzelec, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Within these studio sections the students were originally divided into four groups that must generate unique designs to compete against the other teams in their section and develop a large idea pool to be drawn from for the selection to a single design from each studio. Students attend a lecture led by Schneider and during a design studio session the professors take on a consultant role, allowing students to receive input on their various pod designs. By facilitating an environment of competition, the professors teach students how to identify multiple solutions to engineering problems such as friction, safety and cost, and determine the most effective processes in order to compete with their peers. Students must select and present their best ideas to the other three groups and their section's professor. The two studio sections have just completed their final selections to form a single, unified team with a strong design.
At the conclusion of the semester the students will join 100 teams from universities around the world, as well as six other Texas A&M sponsored teams to present the best overall design. During the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Design Weekend, engineers from around the world will converge upon the Texas A&M campus to have their pod designs evaluated for an opportunity to compete in the final competition scheduled for June 2016 in Hawthorne, California.