Andrew Gras

Team Hyperlynx started as a Mechanical Engineering senior design project but has since been established as a continuing campus organization. The team is multi-disciplinary and consists of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and computer science majors working together to build a pod. Originally founded in 2015, the team competed in the first annual SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, which brought teams from all over the world to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, CA. In 2013 Elon Musk released his white paper on the Hyperloop, a network of tubes for pods to travel through at supersonic speeds, shortening commutes and reducing traffic across the globe.

The SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition is essentially an autonomous drag race. The winner of the competition is the team which can reach the highest top speed and stop before the end of the 4500ft test track. Outside of proving the safety of each vehicle, there are no design constraints. For the original competition teams showed up with a mixture of designs that mostly fell into three categories: magnetic levitation, air-bearings and wheeled designs.

Team Hyperlynx has selected a wheeled pod for our design. While this limits the theoretical top speed, it also significantly reduces the cost, weight, complexity, and power requirements for our vehicle. The original white paper acknowledged that mag-lev was the most likely propulsion technology to be used to achieve supersonic, long distance travel. In reality, pods will likely use a combination of wheels and mag-lev, possibly utilizing wheels during acceleration, braking and extra-tube maneuvers and then retracting the wheels and operating with mag-lev during long distance high speed sections. With all of this in mind, we are confident that our choice to build a wheeled pod for the competition has direct relevance to for the future of the Hyperloop.

Biography:

Andrew K. Gras is a rising senior at the University of Colorado Denver (UCD) pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. In addition to his studies, Andrew is the Electrical Lead for Team Hyperlynx, the UCD Hyperloop competition team. The team is currently preparing for next year’s competition to be held during the summer of 2019. Andrew’s technical foundation sprouted when he worked as a spot light operator for Hope Summer Repertory Theatre at age 15. He then worked for about a decade as a freelance lighting designer which spurred his interest in Electrical Engineering. Andrew started his studies at UCD in the fall of 2014.