India’s first global Hyperloop Pod contest to be held at IIT-M in July

Called the ‘Indian Hyperloop Pod Competition,’ the objective of the competition is to encourage student teams in the country and abroad to develop 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.

Hyperloop is the 5th 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 1000 km per hour, conveying people or objects at high speed while being very efficient, thereby drastically reducing travel times over medium-range distances.

Speaking about this competition, Prof SR Chakravarthy, Faculty Advisor, Avishkar Hyperloop, said, “Hyperloop is a disruptive technology because it can potentially be an inter-city metro. 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.”

According to him, student teams would participate to design and build a subscale prototype transport vehicle to demonstrate the technical feasibility of various aspects of the Hyperloop concept. The competition would focus on multiple key aspects involved in designing, manufacturing and testing Hyperloop Pod. The short-listed teams selected for the final round would have to develop a fully functional prototype of their design for demonstration at Hyperloop Test Track in the IIT Madras Campus.

Based on the evaluation of the submitted design reports, selected teams would be invited for the final round to showcase and test their prototype at IIT Madras. The teams here would be evaluated on the basis of various factors such as subsystem design, overall aesthetics, business plan amongst many others. The judges and inspectors for each of the criteria would be one or more members of a panel consisting of professors, alumni and domain experts. The top three teams would be awarded finally based on their cumulative score.