Chassis Design/FEA
Paradigm Hyperloop
SpaceX and the Boring Company ran four student hyperloop competitions from 2016-2019 in Hawthorne, CA. The challenge has been to design and build a fully functional hyperloop pod (minus the passenger compartment) that can travel the fastest in a 1200m vacuum tube and stop itself before the end wall. Starting in 2021, the Boring Company has been running a tunnel boring competition every year, with varying goals centered around tunnel creation. Paradigm Hyperloop is a multinational team consisting of students from Northeastern University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and the College of the North Atlantic.
On the Hyperloop side, Northeastern has competed in all four competitions, however I have only had a hand in Competition IV and preparation for the postponed Competition V. I served as a mechanical designer responsible for the pod chassis. I used Solidworks weldments to design a chassis that would be bale to support every other component of the pod. This meant constant communication with the other subsystems and TONS of iterations on the design. After each iteration I would set up a fully defined FEA study to determine if the current design could handle the various forces, especially the braking force, which could cause decelerations of up to 7G’s.
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When I first took up this role, I was about a month into college with no FEA experience. The entire competition was an amazing learning experience, from watching how to weldments videos to setting up and running fully constrained chassis simulations in the parking lot of SpaceX in Hawthorne, CA. It took a lot of failing along the way, but by taking a “fail fast” mentality and trying to never make the same mistake twice we got closer to the finished product every time. At the end of the day, we were able to get 8th place in world.
Coming out of the 2019 competition, I had more experience and thus was ready for more responsibility. I immediately dove into designing a new chassis based on our lessons learned, and being a more active voice in integration meetings. After researching new materials, I settled on carbon fiber composite with a hexagon core. I was pushing ahead in this design in the fall of 2019, when it slowly became apparent that something was happening with the 2020 competition. No new rules had been released, and no deadlines posted. The 2020 Hyperloop Competition was poised to be postponed, even prior to the events of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this delay the team faced some attrition, and I stepped up to become the new Mechanical Lead. We continued pursuing a hyperloop pod design, while also diverting some resources to push future technologies that could assist us later. These included deeper materials investigations, test processes, and what a future infrastructure for widespread Hyperloop in the U.S. could look like. Then, it was officially announced that Hyperloop competition would not be continuing, and instead the Boring Company would host a competition to design a tunnel boring machine. This was a surprise, but it was exciting to have a new challenge to tackle as well. I immediately pivoted the mechanical team to this new endeavor, and began to breakdown the constraints and what a design could look like. I created the initial frame and shield shown below, and helped coordinate all of the various subsystems to ensure that everyone was on the same page. The design came together, and I helped author and edit our 215 page design package that we submitted. The Boring Company liked our design, and we made the downselect to continue our work and start manufacturing. This was an extremely rewarding role, but also very demanding. As 2021 continued, I found myself forced to make decisions due to academics and other pursuits, and could not give the team the attention they deserved. I stepped into an advisory role as we entered the fabrication and assembly phase. I was also unable to attend the competition in September 2021 in Las Vegas, but the team did very well, placing 6th out of the 400 entries into the competition. I am proud to have been a part of this success and learned a tremendous amount about engineering leadership in the process.
