Roshan Pradhan

Aditya Katyayan

The Hyperloop technology has been proposed in recent years as a novel mode of transportation which will revolutionize inter-city cargo and passenger transport. The Hyperloop system under consideration in this paper is based on a form of permanent-magnet levitation, known as Electro-Dynamic Suspension (EDS). The specific problem being tackled here is the dynamic analysis of the ‘Orca pod’ – Team Hyperloop India’s entry into the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition II held at Hawthorne, California. Through this example, this paper will frame a generalized method for analysing and designing the vehicle dynamics of an EDS based pod. For the design of the Orca pod, an equivalent kinematic model with 17 degrees of freedom was built in Simulink and data was extracted from the model for analysis. To validate the model, the results were compared with the trends obtained by analytically solving a simplified, linearized dynamical system. The construction of the model and methods used for the extraction of data are presented in detail. Further, the application of the results to the mechanical and control systems design of vehicle dynamics and braking subsystems are also illustrated. The paper concludes with a discussion of the application of the aforementioned procedures to a generalized EDS system. With vast potential applications of Hyperloop technology, designing such a framework will act as a significant boost to the research and development taking place in the field.