A team of University of Maryland students will compete in SpaceX's Hyperloop Pod Competition on February 27-29, 2017. The competition is designed to advance the Hyperloop concept for a new form of transportation in which passenger-carrying pods travel between cities through above-ground tubes at very high speeds.
The UMD team, called UMD Loop, will compete against 30 other student teams on a 1-mile test track SpaceX built adjacent to its Hawthorne, California headquarters. Teams will pit pod against pod to see who comes out on top in the areas of: final design and construction, safety and reliability, and performance in operations.
More than 40 of the UMD team’s 60 members—undergraduates in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences and the Clark School of Engineering—made the trek to the West Coast for the competition.
The teams competing in the finals were selected during the competition’s Design Weekend held January 29-30, 2016, on the Texas A&M University campus. More than 115 student teams from around the world presented their pod design plans and were judged on a variety of criteria, including innovation and uniqueness of design, full Hyperloop system applicability and economics, level of design detail, strength of supporting analysis and tests, feasibility, and quality of documentation and presentation.
Media Relations Contact: Abby Robinson, 301-405-5845, abbyr@umd.edu
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About the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences
The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland educates more than 7,000 future scientific leaders in its undergraduate and graduate programs each year. The college’s 10 departments and more than a dozen interdisciplinary research centers foster scientific discovery with annual sponsored research funding exceeding $150 million.