IIT Madras to host global Hyperloop Pod contest

 Following in the footsteps of SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is planning to organise a "Global Hyperloop Pod Competition" to increase awareness and enthusiasm about this transportation mode in the country.

The competition is open globally and the final round will take place in the IIT Madras campus in July 2020, IIT Madras said on Wednesday.

Musk proposed the idea of Hyperloop to the world in 2013 through a white paper "Hyperloop Alpha."

The tech billionaire has been organising the International Hyperloop Pod Competition for the past few years in Hawthorne, California, through SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company.

Team Avishkar from IIT Madras was the only team from Asia to qualify for the finals of "SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition 2019" held in Los Angeles on July 21, developing India's first self-propelled Hyperloop Pod.

Although the competition was won by Team TUM (Technical University of Munich), who set a new speed record of 463 km per hour, Avishkar Hyperloop met Musk, who was all praise for their stupendous work.

Hyperloop offers a new mode of transportation, a high-speed train that travels in a near-vacuum tube.

The reduced air resistance allows the capsule inside the tube to reach speeds of more than 1,000 km/h, conveying people or objects at high speed while being very efficient, thereby drastically reducing travel time over medium-range distances.

The objective of the competition that IIT Madras is now organising is to encourage student teams in India and abroad to develop a Hyperloop Pod and compete to build the fastest, most innovative and efficient design and prototype of the relevant technologies in the field.

This competition is open to all the engineering colleges across the world, to ideate, design and implement their ideas for the Hyperloop Pods, IIT Madras said.

"We are excited at the prospect of hosting this competition at IIT Madras. Hyperloop is a disruptive technology because it can potentially be an inter-city metro," Professor S.R. Chakravarthy, Faculty Advisor, Avishkar Hyperloop, said in a statement.

"We need to be at the forefront of developing this important technology to move a large number of people in a country like India. The competition is a great way of on-boarding the next generation for this developmental process," Chakravarthy added. IANS