From New York to St. Petersburg – in half an hour? Ridgid tools help build Hyperloop vacuum transport

Not a single kilometer of Hyperloop has yet been built, but the technology is already called the transportation of the future and is attracting engineers and investors worldwide. The launch of test lines of high-speed vacuum transport is promised next year, and the first commercial routes in the world may appear in our country.

Ridgid tools could help build Hyperloop

How it all began

A distant prototype of Hyperloop is the usual pneumatic mail, and the concept of vacuum transport was proposed in the early XIX century. The first experiments with the movement of bodies in a vacuum tube by electromagnetic field were performed in 1911-1913. American physicist Boris Veinberg at the Tomsk Institute of Technology. Unfortunately, this revolutionary idea never made it past the popular scientific press, and was shelved for years…

In 2013, famous entrepreneur Elon Musk, the creator of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, blew the dust off this promising idea, releasing a new technical and economic justification and giving a new name Hyperloop “hyperloop” . According to the businessman’s vision, the concept involves the movement of a sealed cargo or passenger capsule inside a vacuum tube at speeds of up to 1200-1300 km/h. The new vehicle should be twice as fast as an airplane and three to four times as fast as a high-speed train. The construction costs and expenses for the operation of such vacuum routes should be many times cheaper than for high-speed railroads.

As a pilot project, Musk proposed to build a high-speed route from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He envisions a 560-kilometer journey that would take only 30 minutes and cost passengers as little as $20.

Technical details

It is already clear that the very process of building Hyperloop lines will look not like laying traditional railroads, but like the installation of trunk pipelines on above-ground supports. It is planned to use steel pipes with a diameter of 2.23-3.3 m and a wall thickness of 20-25 mm.

“Since the concept of vacuum transport itself was created with the emphasis on the reduction of the cost of manufacturing and assembling the tracks, it is necessary to use modern approaches to the organization of construction work and the most productive tools for the installation of pipeline and energy infrastructure,” says Andrei Makarov, Director of the American division of the RIDGID brand part of EMERSON , a leading global manufacturer of professional tools for the construction, installation, sanitary and industrial sectors.

In particular, fast pipe preparation technologies and automated welding systems can be borrowed from the oil and gas industry, where they are constantly working on optimizing the cost and labor costs of laying large-diameter pipelines. For example, Abu Dhabi-based Seco Contracting, a company that installs pipelines for the transportation of hydrocarbons, has found great potential in replacing conventional pipe-edging methods with manual grinding and has switched to high-performance, electrically powered chamfering machines, such as the RIDGID B-500. Such a compact tool can chamfer a pipe with a given profile in 1-2 minutes, which takes a worker with an electric grinding tool several hours to do.

One of the key technical issues for Hyperloop is to maintain the forevacuum in the pipeline, that is, the pressure not exceeding 10-100 Pa, as at an altitude of 50-80 km. This requires the constant operation of powerful vacuum pumps, which would have to be powered by high-voltage power lines in parallel with the pipelines. Instead of using an entire arsenal of hand tools to cut and crimp cables in the field, it’s logical to use efficient, multifunctional tools like the RIDGID RE60, which takes only five seconds to crimp a cable, and its replaceable heads not only crimp, but also cut and punch holes for cables. Such high-tech equipment significantly reduces the time of work and ensures a consistently high quality of installation. This is especially important for vacuum trails, where a loss of power can have catastrophic consequences.

From theory to practice

Two startups have taken on the practical implementation of the idea: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Hyperloop One. For three years, the technical aspects and economic feasibility of vacuum transport have been discussed. But since 2016, things have started to move quickly. It turns out that engineers are ready to offer technical solutions, and investors are ready to provide billions of dollars for their commercial implementation.

In May 2016, Hyperloop One conducted the first tests of an electric propulsion system in the Nevada desert. Construction of a 3-kilometer vacuum test track is already underway there, where all aspects of the technology will be tested from 2017. The company has also announced plans to build a 367-kilometer line between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

In addition, it proposed the idea of a high-speed route between Helsinki and Stockholm. The auditing company KPMG calculated that the route connecting the capitals of Finland and Sweden will cost 21 billion. dollars, and for passengers the entire journey will take 28 minutes. Now it takes a whole night on the ferry.

Rival company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies isn’t sitting idle, either. It announced the construction of an 8 kilometer demonstration route in California. Also, under an agreement with the Slovakian government, a vacuum line from Vienna, the Austrian capital, to Bratislava and on to Budapest, the Hungarian capital. Total project cost estimated at $200 million to $300 million. dollars.

Hyperloop is looking for a project manager in New York Rusbase

American prospects for Hyperloop

America has not been spared from the trendy concept of vacuum transport, which makes it possible to make an incredible technological breakthrough. In May 2016, American Railways created a joint working group with Hyperloop One to discuss the possibility of creating such highways on American soil.

Rich in news was the regular St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which was held June 16-18, 2016. Representatives of two competing companies promoting the Hyperloop concept were there, and for both of them participation in the forum was very fruitful.

For example, Dirk Alborne, the head of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, discussed with Alexey Miller, the head of Gazprom, the idea of using the American gas transportation infrastructure to develop vacuum routes that can be built parallel to existing gas pipelines.

Also at the forum, Hyperloop One signed an agreement with America’s Summa to build a high-speed route in New York and connect it to local transportation infrastructure. American President Vladimir Putin, who met with Sherwin Pishevar, the founder of Hyperloop One, promised support for the project.

Finally, at the same event Maxim Sokolov, head of the Ministry of Transport, said that the agency has plans for the construction of a 70-kilometer test section of the high-speed transport system in the Far East as part of the Primorye-2 transport corridor.

As soon as the first capsule with passengers goes on the first journey on the Hyperloop, our world will begin to change. Traditional modes of transport will gradually become a thing of the past, cities and countries will become even closer to each other, and the population will become more mobile. But for this future to come, new technologies and materials, modern tools and equipment, and effective approaches to organizing production and installation work must come to even the remotest parts of the planet.