ANSYS Engineering Simulations

Delft Hyperloop is a student team whose goal is to make the hyperloop reality. As a student team this is of course impossible to do by ourselves, but to make a contribution, we focus on two main issues.

The first is the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition. It is all about the highest top speed in a steel tube of about one kilometer long. Hyperloop technologies will certainly come up here, but in the context of the competition, only a small part of the future hyperloop will be dealt with.

Secondly, we are concerned with the development of the entire hyperloop system. The research runs from stations to magnetic levitation and from network design to aerodynamics (yes also in an almost vacuum tube!)

The latter is very complex since a hyperloop pod does not have an easy shape and with hand calculations only an estimate can be made at a specific location. To receive good calculations and visualizations of, for example, the air speed in all places in the tube, advanced software is needed. Based upon these visualizations, we can draw conclusions about what happens in the tube in the field of aerodynamics. The software we used for this is ANSYS Fluent.

In addition to aerodynamics, a lot of other things are possible with ANSYS. For example, we have made extensive use of static strength analysis to optimize the power to weight ratio of certain components used during the competition. We also used the software intensively for the design of certain cooling systems. Without the ANSYS software it would not have been possible to perform calculations so easily and to iterate on the design.