Michigan Hyperloop Competition III: Propulsion Lead

Overview

The Hyperloop competition III involved our team designing a vehicle to run in a vacuum and achieved the highest possible speed over a 1 km stretch. The rules of the competition allowed for many different forms of propulsion, braking or stabilization. Our team's job was to design, manufacture and test our vehicle within a 9 month time frame. I was elected the team's propulsion lead which meant that I was in charge of leading the technical development of the propulsion system and integration of the system with the larger vehicle.

Major complications

Due to our team still being in the infancy phase we did not have an existing body of knowledge to draw from when attempting this design. This meant that every design choice required large amounts of engineering work to quantify the ramifications. Every decision required in-depth discussions amongst many sub-teams. For example, the controls team may decide on a bolt for hardware mounting, but weren't considering the issues of of gassing with that material. This meant that our team, which was comprised of full time students who also held jobs, had to coordinate and execute a major interdisciplinary design project, manufacture the resultant design ourselves, and then perform all required testing within the timeline of 9 months. A feat not even many large companies can accomplish!

My Contributions

As the propulsion lead I was tasked with the overseeing the development of the propulsion system. Since we didn’t even know what method we wanted to use, we started from the ground up. I led a team of 20 people as we held trade studies on the propulsion system to settle on our mode of propulsion. From there, we worked tirelessly to flesh out the propulsion design while maintaining regular communication the other sub-teams to guarantee overall integration. This was a seemingly insurmountable task as it involved endless quantifications such as FEA stress analysis, vibrational analysis, power-to-weight optimization, amongst many others. Seemingly small changes could have massive changes downstream and this meant large amount of design iterations before settling on a final design. This was all completed within two months while juggling a part time job, a full time enrollment, and my contributions to other design teams.

After developing a detailed CAD model of the system with proper revision control, I oversaw manufacturing of the propulsion system. We manufactured most components in-house, but I coordinated with local manufacturing companies to help with the more complicated parts.

The integration of the overall system proved to one of the most most daunting tasks. This was because we planned for integration to occur over summer. The problem is most of the team had gone away, either for family or internships. That meant that only a team of 5 people who were stayed local had the task of fully integrating every subsystem. I spent the entirety of the summer leading the integration and fixes the myriad of integration issues as they popped up.

At the end of the summer, we shipped off to competition. There my job shifted to working with the SpaceX employees to pass all of their testing to be compete. Only 3 of the 19 competing teams were able to get everything functional in time. Unfortunately, we were not amongst those 3, but the competition week saw us solving engineering issues at breakneck speeds with amazing perseverance.