The beginning phases of senior design can often be a very hectic time. First you have the burden of finding the perfect combination of people for a group. You want a well diverse group of engineers, but at the same time like-minded enough that you can get along and work well together. Fortunately, early on we had a good idea of the members we wanted in our group; Bryan Bell, Eduardo Cavallin, Carl Huebner, Brett Seymore, and Jeffrey Vo. For the most part we have all shared most of our recent classes at Drexel and have even worked together in different groups for these projects. We all knew that we worked well together and had no doubt about being successful as a whole if we worked together on Senior Design.
Now the big task was to find a project. We needed something that was interesting to all of us, fulfilled the requirements of senior design, but at the same time would not be impossible to complete in the 9 months prior to graduation.This was a struggled at first, but fortunately we stumbled across a big project that Drexel's DSSL (Drexel Space Systems Laboratory) team was trying to get involved with. Elon Musk's new rising company Space-X and holding a global competition called the "Hyperloop Pod Competition". This is a huge project that can be broken down into many sub-components that could easily be orientated toward senior design.
Hyperloop is meant to be a new revolutionary form a high speed ground transportation from San Francisco, California to Los Angeles California. This is the perfect medium between flying, driving, or riding the train. Hyperloop is meant to be safer, faster, cost effective, more convenient, unaffected by weather, resistant to earthquakes, sustainably self-powering, and not disruptive to those along the route. The current alternatives are either too expensive, too time consuming, too inconvenient, or a combination of the three. Hyperloop hopes to attack all three angles of this and turn into the ultimate mode of low cost transportation, getting you there is the shortest amount of time and staying extremely convenient.
Drexel's DSSL has entered this Hyperloop competition as one whole unit and will be comprised of many subsystems that can be taken on by individual senior design groups. The subsystem that our group decided to tackle is the emergency braking system. In the event that a problem arises and an emergency stop is required in the middle of the tube, we must find a way to safely bring the pod to a halt. This sub-system was further broken down into two categories, low-speed braking and high-speed braking. High speed braking will take care of slowing the pod down from 600mph to 200mph by use of methods such as reverse propulsion. The area that our group will be focused on is the low-speed braking which will account for slowing down from speeds of 300mph to a complete stop by the use of mechanical braking.
However, because of the fact that this is a global competition, there is always the chance that the Drexel team will not make it into the competition. In this event, the senior design groups will need a backup plan so that we can still meet the senior design requirements. In our case, the target of our project will then be applied to the braking of high velocity land and air vehicles.
Now that our rough ideas have started to become organized and we completed our projects pre-proposal, the next landmark was to find an adviser. We were lucky enough to have the chance to pitch our idea to Dr. Leslie Lamberson and she really liked the potential that we showed. Dr. Lamberson specializes is mechanics of materials and we hope that with her guidance we will be able to deliver a revolutionary braking system.
Through the course of this project, we will all be working together as a fluid team, but there are some rough divisions of the work that we proposed to get us started. For now, Carl will be doing research on regenerative braking and motorization, Brett and Bryan will be working on the landing gear design and structure, and Eduardo is working on determining the ideal ceramic brake size and formation. Jeff has taken the role of project manager and has been getting everyone organized and ensuring that we meet deadlines as well as being present at all Hyperloop meetings.
