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RE: Mathematically Breaking Down the Hyperloop (Math Warning) Part 1
They evacuated the Large Hadron Collider so it likes like an energetically feasible idea. And you only have to do it once (plus vacuum maintenance energy of course).
I wonder if the Hyperloop will recover the energy to accelerate their train with regenerative braking. Get back most of what you put in?
If you compare the energy costs of the Hyperloop to the energy costs of the airline industry it might come out quite favourable.
The LHC is a 26-27 km tube that is about 7 cm in diameter, the hyperloop is suggested to be around 560 km and around 4m in diameter. As well since you will have the air pressure on the entire external surface of the structure and next to no internal pressure acting as support the structure which will cause many major structural problems as not many materials will be able to handle the sheer force that will be acting upon it in such a hot climate.
As for getting back what they put in, sure they could get back some of what they put in for actually accelerating the passenger pod (which as shown above will be nothing compared to the energy requirements to empty the tube.... which they are planning on repressurizing the entire thing when people get in and out of the pod and then depressurizing it again, as linked in the paper) meaning our lower limit estimation on energy required to operate the hyperloop is around 1675 times that of the Transrapid maglev train in Germany, remember that is lower limit.
Now one could say that solar panels will make up the energy difference but if we were to cover the entire top half of the hyperloop with around 20% efficient solar panels (that is about average when looking on the market) we will produce around 571.7 MW (MJ/s) which means it would take roughly 1000 seconds to just produce the energy to operate the hypothetical 100% efficient pumps and power the track along with take care of colling the track... oh and solar panels decrease in efficiency (exponentially) as they heat up, same with conductors and funny enough, pumps.
Now sure a jumbo jet making the same trip (using rough estimates) will take about 2-3 times the energy as what was used to just evacuate the air... but the plans for the hyperloop is to have the damn thing on a track (meaning there is still friction) like a normal train, they aren't even planning on using maglev in a lot of the plans... So viable... no, it will be an expensive train ticket (like super expensive). Assuming they do go maglev then the expected operating energy costs will be similar to that of regular maglevs but slightly more feasable.
Will it ever be a cheap way to travel? Maybe, but the more I look into this the more I see an engineering nightmare