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Transportation Science Technology

13-Year-Old Scientist Designs Alternative To Hyperloop (cnn.com) 138

dryriver shares a report from CNN: Several rival companies may be hard at work trying to get Elon Musk's Hyperloop concept off the ground, but hurtling across country -- maybe even across continents -- at 600 miles per hour in a low-pressure steel tube still feels far from reality. But 13-year-old New York student Caroline Crouchley may have invented a more economically viable and eco-friendly Hyperloop solution. Crouchley's idea, which just won second place in the annual 3M Young Scientist Challenge, is to build pneumatic tubes next to existing train tracks. Magnetic shuttles would travel through these vacuum tubes, connected via magnetic arm to trains traveling on the existing tracks. This system would utilize current train tracks, thereby cutting infrastructure costs and, Crouchley says, eradicating the potential safety risk posed by propelling passengers in a vacuum. There'd be no need for trains to use diesel or electric motors, making the trains lighter and more fuel-efficient. This is important to Crouchley, who aims to devise active solutions to the climate crisis. "I pinpointed transportation as something I wanted to work on because if we can make trains more efficient, then we can eliminate the amount of cars, trucks and buses on the road," Crouchley tells CNN Travel.
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13-Year-Old Scientist Designs Alternative To Hyperloop

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  • by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @05:51PM (#59371146)
    Can you be a scientist just because you say you are?
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @05:55PM (#59371154)

      Can you be a scientist just because you say you are?

      No. To be a scientist, you have to "do science": Form a falsifiable hypothesis and then test it.

      So she is not a scientist. She is an engineer.

      • To bet an engineer you have to apply science to something that works, not make a napkin drawing.
      • So she is not a scientist. She is an engineer.

        She is a scienteer.

      • Can you be a scientist just because you say you are?

        No. To be a scientist, you have to "do science": Form a falsifiable hypothesis and then test it.

        So she is not a scientist. She is an engineer.

        It's about operating a train; checks out.

  • by sherlocktk ( 260059 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @05:54PM (#59371152) Homepage

    I dont understand having the tube next to the train. The whole point of the hyperloop was to travel with less wind resisstance/drag/Electric only

    The train can already be electric, and this does nothing to remove drag. I don't understand why this is novel in the firs place It adds more infrastructure and solves nothing.

    • by lazarus ( 2879 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @05:59PM (#59371174) Journal

      You're not missing anything. The problem is the translation from the STEM encouragement of 13 year-olds into click-baity headlines that end up on Slashdot.

    • But but itâ(TM)s pneumatic train with magnets! Thatâ(TM)s got to be better than wires with electricity and brushes!
    • It doesn't reduce drag, but it could potentially be slightly more efficient since the locomotive is smaller and you don't have to haul the fuel as well as the cargo.

      I doubt that the small efficiency gain is worth the cost of building the infrastructure for it, though. Cost per pound for freight shipment by train is already dirt cheap.

      • The weight of fuel carried by the locomotives (or even tenders, if those are still a thing) is minuscule to the weight of the carriages being pulled.

        So yeah, that set my eyebrows into my receding hair line as well.

      • It doesn't reduce drag, but it could potentially be slightly more efficient since the locomotive is smaller and you don't have to haul the fuel as well as the cargo.

        I doubt that the small efficiency gain is worth the cost of building the infrastructure for it, though. Cost per pound for freight shipment by train is already dirt cheap.

        Of course electric trains already don't have to haul the fuel; they are usually powered from overhead catenary wires.

        And even if you did want to remove the weight of the electr

    • She's 13yo and people are rewarding her for stepping up to try to tackle problems that most people are content to ignore. Not because her product is peer with professional engineers. It's a form of encouragement intended to inspire her and others like her to actually pursue a career in engineering.
      • by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @06:15PM (#59371234)
        I wonder whether some nice words from her parents and teachers would not be the more appropriate form of encouragement than publishing such exaggerated press articles. Maybe this is because journalists today are incapable of distinguishing cute children ideas from actual technological progress?
        • by cb88 ( 1410145 )
          Yeah because never in a million years would an actual engineer consider putting the tubes next to existing train routes... sheesh that's like the first thing anyone should consider.

          A major problem with that is train derailments which are not uncommon... they just don't typically end in disaster because nothing was around and it occurred at low speed etc... well putting a tube next to the tracks means *every* derailment is a serious problem.
          • Derailments aren't that serious of an issue.
            Width of the rail right-of-way isn't wide enough to support more tracks or there would be more rail already. The US rail system is overloaded without the ability to expand.
            Another issue are all the telephone poles along side of the tracks. They were originally used for rail signalling but in many places now have fiber optic lines. It's a big job to move them out of the way,
            Still another issue are the towers for the catenary wires along the commuter routes. You

            • Derailments aren't that serious of an issue.

              They aren't because of the space left to either side of the rail line. Even so they sometimes are a serious issue.

              Width of the rail right-of-way isn't wide enough to support more tracks or there would be more rail already.

              You don't need more tracks, just more sidings. But in many places there is adequate room for double tracks. We're often not fully utilizing the rail we have already, which is why we haven't laid down more rail even where we can.

              Another issue are all the telephone poles along side of the tracks. They were originally used for rail signalling but in many places now have fiber optic lines. It's a big job to move them out of the way,

              The fiber along rail lines was mostly laid by Qwest (never forget) and they buried most of it.

              Still another issue are the towers for the catenary wires along the commuter routes. You're not moving them easily.

              Some catenary line is easily moved, because it's mounted to gantries. I have

              • What about Sprint? (Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications)

                • Qwest was founded by a former exec of SP. The whole business plan was to bury fiber along the ROW, which was made possible by actions he took while at SP. Qwest's CEO Nacchio was the only telco CEO to refuse to install the feds' backbone monitoring equipment, then they charged him with insider trading and denied him bail. Your tax dollars at work. That line was buried. There were photos of the rail cars being used for it.

      • That's awesome, and I think we should do everything to encourage bright young kids to pursue a career in science or engineering. But encouraging them shouldn't include silly articles like the CNN one. No "teenager solves x / designs a better y" clickbaity headlines either, they don't do anyone any favours, least of all the teenager.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

      If it had blockchain integration, it would be way better than a normal train. Oh well, can't expect a 13-year-old to invent the future by themselves.

      • by shanen ( 462549 )

        If it had blockchain integration, it would be way better than a normal train. Oh well, can't expect a 13-year-old to invent the future by themselves.

        Does it really deserve a funny mod without working Wesley into it?

        Okay, I'll shut up now.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      As I understand the diagram, the notion seems to be to send a really big motorized magnetic slug through the evacuated pneumatic tube, and magnetically couple a dummy "engine" in front of the train to the magnetic slug.

      Unlike a mag-lev train, the tracks are still conventional, so you've got great big rolling friction losses, and I can see no way that the train could be any faster or any lower vibration than it is on existing tracks with existing engines. The cost would be mu

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        I think they mean an actual pneumatic tube, i.e. the magnetic slug would be pushed using air pressure applied from one end. I have no idea what the efficiency of such a design would look like.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The efficiency gain comes from using pneumatic tubes. Instead of having the motor/engine fixed to the train, you have it stationary at the end of the track pumping air into the tube. The theory is that you reduce weight and can potentially make the air pump more efficient due to not having size and weight constraints.

        It's not an entirely new idea, there have been similar systems in use before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Magnetic coupling is novel I think, but I'm not convinced it would be any more eff

        • So what are the advantages? Seems to me like some kid invented the horribly lossy pneumatic power line.

          I mean, good for them - tackling these sorts of problems as a kid is a great endeavour! But why is a creative child's non-solution like this in the news?

          I'd bet good money that the energy losses from a magnetically coupled pneumatic slug far exceed the transmission losses in a similarly expensive high-voltage overhead "streetcar line". To say nothing of the relative maintenance costs of the two.

          And, unle

        • https://www.bing.com/videos/se... [bing.com]

          This 89-year-old dude already has one of these trains running on the grounds of his Mendocino, CA vineyard.

    • by whit3 ( 318913 )
      This is a rehashing of the ancient Victorian 'atmospheric railway'; the benefit is that the moving item does not carry fuel and engines, and (since it has no passengers) this also means no seats, carpets, lights, restrooms, etc. The atmospheric railway didn't work well (the seal materials attracted rats) but has quite a colorful history
      • The idea to improve on the "differential pressure" design has been around for a while. Watch the video to see the working model of a magnetic-coupled pneumatic-powered train built in California. The designer describes the benefits of the design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
  • I've given the whole train/rollercoaster idea a lot of thought, I've had similar ideas.

    Existing tracks are a bad idea if you want to go fast. The existing tracks aren't designed to go fast, not THAT fast anyways. If you were to build an all new set of tracks you could engineer what you need to for speed.

    On that note - instead of next to a train the best place to build this would be under the train, it would also increase stability instead of sabotaging it. You already have the right-of way under the trai

    • Also the rail road companies that own the Right of Way (granted to them by US gov) have extremely strong legal right and almost NEVER allow competing transportation systems to use their ROW

  • Trying to make ideas from decades old children's books about the future work is a colossal waste of time.

  • boondoggle? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chromal ( 56550 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @05:59PM (#59371172)
    I don't understand how this is a replacement Hyperloop. If it uses existing rail infrastructure, it will run afoul of the traditional rail infrastructure problems Hyperloop was proposed to address: an infrastructure designed and built for 19th century speeds, higher-speed service plagued by freight train traffic/sequencing issues (both of which contribute to keeping the Amtrak Acela from even achieving its modest top speeds over many sections of track). Then there's the vacuum tube / magnetic tug concept--- how would these even work on the existing infrastructure's myriad curves, road crossings, switch yards, bridges, tunnels? And even if you made that investment so that you could replace electric and diesel locomotives with a tube-based tug, how could that possibly be more efficient in moving existing rail technology than overhead electric lines and electric locomotives such as the Pennsylvania Railroad added one-hundred years ago with its 11kV 25Hz traction power system? You can't really expect to tack on a fashionably new piece of technology to 19th century infrastructure and expect increases in speed, reliability, efficiency. I think you're more liable to wind up with the worst of both worlds-- all the existing infrastructures hitched to a new-fangled buggy unproven locomotion system that is also less efficient and impractical. Is there something I'm missing, here?
    • It's an interesting idea but faces a pretty huge problem in practice, in that most tunnels trains go through are just wide enough for the train (or a train each way). You'd have to expand them out a lot to accommodate this tube... I have to imagine even without the tunnels there are a lot of railway right of ways not wide enough to accommodate this.

      That's the advantage of Hyperloop, you just fennel under everything and can use as much space as you like, in 3 dimensions. And you don't have to deal with wea

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Its like the Advanced Passenger Train (APT) ie a UK attempt at a tilting high speed train.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      Try existing rail infrastructure, make it fast, use better tech, its all so smart, the future... until its time for human testing :)
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Hyperloop won't solve any of those problems either. What solves them is building a brand new track that supports higher speeds by being straight and limited to one type of traffic. Exactly like the Japanese did with their bullet train network.

      Hyperloop does nothing special that the others can't in that regard.

      • by Chromal ( 56550 )
        Hyperloop implicitly does solve those problems by being a clean-sheet design and therefore a brand new track, but as you suggest, really, the solution is governmental-- the government has the power to create the right-of-way for a new high-speed rail infrastructure that's purpose built for the 21st century and high-speed trains. Preferably one that goes to places people in the 21st century want to go, not places the rail executives wanted to go 140 years ago in a vastly different world. Such an infrastructu
  • Don't call it stupid (Score:5, Informative)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @06:00PM (#59371178)

    It would be unfair to call the 13 year old stupid even if it won't work. It's okay to propose an idea. And the way these Science Fairs work you judge HOW they evaluated a hypothesis not WILL IT WORK. That's know as science and so they appropriately call her a scientist.

    What is Stupid is for the news magazine to publish this unquestioningly. A casual analysis spots obvious flaws that would need to be address or at least remarked upon by the author of the news article.

    Just to name but a few. The point of the hyperloop is to get the air resistance and friction down so that the cars inside can travel ballistically and not need a propulsion system except at the terminals. Likewise they need to be small enough so that one can accelerate these things over a short distance. You aren't likely to be accelerating a train fast since they outweigh the passengers by a lot. And there's a momentum mismatch between the drive units and the train.

    I'm guessing that possibly the scientist proposed something else such as pressure or suction to continuously propel the drivers. Not balistic transport.

    • I disagree. I won my science fair with what I proved. Not by proposing an idea and not actually implementing it. This is why science is going the way of the dodo. The work is the reward. Not the participation trophy. Science fairs used reward actual findings. Now they reward effort. This is not how you teach science. If this were the case, we would still be living in caves and believing the earth was flat.
  • So we just take existing train tracks good enough to support a normal train traveling at 965km/h we build a tube next to it, we run a humongous magnet through that tube - strong enough to be able to pull the aforementioned train at 965km/h (600mph) against the outside air pressure and it will be safer.

    ... somebody submitted a 4chan troll physics comic to that contest and somehow it got the 2nd place.

    Problem ?

  • Do I understand it correctly that this would "work" more like a regular pneumatic tube system, byt sucking a magnet through the tube, which would pull an arm on the outside of the tube, which in turn would pull a train along? Obviously there are so many ways that this is highly unlikely so scale into reality, but let's give the kid a break. She's a 13-year old in a science fair, not her fault CNN decided to run a stupid story about her project.
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org] This idea broke him 150 years ago. Perhaps weâ(TM)ll have better luck this time...
  • She won 2nd place for that? Has the world gone crazy? Would I have won 1st place with a train powered by rubber bands wound up by donkeys? I think I would.
  • Back in the Gilded Age the government gave massive land grants to the railroad to build tracks in the West and to this day they zealously monitor and profit from their land assets. QWest [wikipedia.org] ran a lot of Internet backbone fiber optic lines along railroad tracks.

    Good luck trying to negotiate public right of way on existing private rail lines at an economical price. I bet it would be cheaper and a better long term strategy to build massive underground tunnels like Elon is doing and wait for the next wave of gove

  • Greta Thunberg? (Score:2, Informative)

    by lamer01 ( 1097759 )
    CNN Sucks
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I'd love to see a car ferry concept on a train. Best of both worlds: each person has their own customized space and don't have to associate with the hoi polloi, and the trainspotters get their toys.

      Unfortunately, I don't think it could be efficient. Not enough density.

  • The whole selling point of Hyperloop was that it had the potential to be *fast*, blowing right by the current state of the art in high-speed rail and giving air travel a run for its money. The original paper outlined a system so fast that tracks would have to turn a very wide radius to avoid causing discomfort to the passengers. You obviously can't do that on existing rights-of-way.

  • Crouchley's idea, ... is to build pneumatic tubes next to existing train tracks. Magnetic shuttles would travel through these vacuum tubes, connected via magnetic arm to trains traveling on the existing tracks.

    Have fun getting the "right of ways" and land next to existing tracks to build on. Maybe this would work cross-country, but in densely built/populated areas, there may not be enough land next to the tracks for this. Hell, my city wouldn't even approve building a light-rail system on our existing unused rail tracks -- mainly because it didn't want the expense of trying to get the land/right-of-ways to build stations and extension tracks.

  • Not a new idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NaiveBayes ( 2008210 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @07:25PM (#59371398)
    I'm pretty sure the proposal for propelling a train by using a pressurized tube running alongside the train is an old idea. In fact, there's a name for it: Atmospheric Railway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It's been around in different forms since the 19th Century.
  • The current record for a high-speed train that actually works & can carry passengers (in 7 cars) is 603kph (375mph).

    Let me know when they've come up with a vacuum tube train that actually works & can carry a load of passengers. Anything else is just a pipe dream.

  • The idea of putting people in a vacuum and blasting them down a tube at 600+ mph invokes many safety concerns.

    I had the "Hyperloop" idea a decade or so before Elon. I too was once a kid and I too saw the drive through bank tubes. The evolution seems simple.

    My idea was to build massive tubes from coast to cost ( with many "tributaries") obviously.

    But instead of being above ground it would be below ( Elon's boring company might help) And instead of sending people it would be cargo.

    With far less trucks on th

  • This seems silly and an idea I had when I was 15 actually seems a little less strange. Any opinions on whether this would work?

    The idea is to merge maglev with conventional rail. The railtrucks containing wheels and the engine would ride on normal rail tracks. There would also be a half-cylinder maglev track (just two sections on the cylinder, from each track up to each side). The passenger vehicle would be suspended on magnets above this cylindrical track. When not moving or at places where there was no ma

    • The idea is to merge maglev with conventional rail. The railtrucks containing wheels and the engine would ride on normal rail tracks. There would also be a half-cylinder maglev track (just two sections on the cylinder, from each track up to each side). [...]
      The main advantage of this over most maglev is that switches are considerably easier, the maglev tracks could end for a straight section and conventional railroad switches used there.

      Your problem is economically infeasible, because you have to build two tracks in one, and maglev is already expensive enough that it doesn't make sense in most cases. For relatively short distances carrying sufficiently high traffic along sufficiently flat routes, maglev is cool. For everything else, it doesn't make economic sense. Normal rail is cheap and good. There are machines that can do all the maintenance with very little human labor, and rail can be laid in a broad variety of environments. It even l

  • Seriously? She is a kid with an idea being promoted by a parent with the hopes of getting some money bags to sign on so they can cash in. There are at least a dozen reasons that this is a bad idea but hay, whatever.
  • Science fairs should teach a student how to prove something. Even if that something is not new or innovative. But simply suggesting an innovation and then not being able to show it can be implemented is insufficient grounds to win a science fair. That's not a science fair. That's a symposium of research papers.
  • Its fantastic that a 13 year old is learning about science and engineering. Learning how to come up with new ideas, and think them through. Its a sign of real potential.

    Its also OK to be a student - most career scientists are students until they are in their late 20s. (BS, PhD, Post-doc).

    The media should however be clear about what is a great student project and what is science and engineering. That said, I've seen a lot worse come out of industry on occasion

  • that 13yo may be nice and all, but fails to understand the concept underlying the need for the entire train to be encased in a vacuum tube... reducing air resistance which will reduce the heating of the external shell of the train. also, the use of maglev propulsion is there to remove the resistance due to rolling steel wheels on steel rails.

    My suspicion is that this "idea" was cooked up by some existing company using the 13yo as a shill

  • by RotateLeftByte ( 797477 ) on Saturday November 02, 2019 @03:15AM (#59372044)

    The greatest Engineer of the 19th Century one, Isambard Kingdom Brunel had just such a railway. It was called the "Atmospheric Railway" and ran along the coast of Devon (UK). The seals were made of leather and used tallow as a lubricant. Rats loved it so the thing didn't last very long. There is still one of the pumping houses in existance at Dawlish.

    Many of IKB's ideas were just impossible to attain using the materials and technology of the time.

  • The main drawback is trying to create that large of a vacuum chamber.

  • If this girl and her teachers had some exerience in modelisme then it would be immediatly clear to them that this is not a viable idea.

    However, it seems they learn about the world from cartoons.
    • If this girl and her teachers had some exerience in modelisme...

      Mmph. I thought I was going to learn a new technique or philosophy and discovered that it's just a typo and French.

      • by Max_W ( 812974 )
        Thank you. Indeed modélisme is a French word for model building. Sorry for this inadvertent mistake.
        • No apology needed! If anything, I should apologize for the snark. I certainly don't mind picking up words in another language, and your point was clear enough.

          And to the point, if they're going to watch cartoons, perhaps they should watch a few Road Runner episodes to get tips on physics :)

  • This tube is meant to be above ground parallel to train tracks.
    I drive over train tracks every day.

  • Don't use steel -- use PVC. Build a walking (long legged) PVC extrusion machine, piering legs into the ground as it goes to hold the tube up in the air.
    The machine would merely need continuous replenishment of PVC resin and liquid fuel for the engine. Using legs that extend and retract, rather than bend at the knee, perfectly smooth movement should be obtainable (six legged) with computer adjustments to balance and inertia. Easily programmable. PVC holds pressure or vacuum very well, is much lighter, is

    • You could have the extruder at the front of the train laying track as you go. No more eminent domain issues!

  • Once it goes live, there'll be differential pricing according to the view (or lack thereof) through the windows. It's like riding in a perpetual half-tunnel

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