Plastics composites supplier Gurit reports that it has become a major sponsor of the EPFLoop student team, which will be competing in the 2019 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.
The competition’s goal is to challenge student teams to make functional prototypes of high-speed ground transport pods. First announced in 2015, this year’s Hyperloop Pod Competition will take place on 21 July 2019 at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, USA. The EPFLoop pod has been developed by a team of students of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) based in Lausanne, Switzerland and is currently being built using a range of Gurit’s lightweight materials.
‘Since the first contact back in October 2018, Gurit has been a strategic partner of the EPFLoop team,’ said Lorenzo Benedetti, team Leader of EPFLoop. ‘In a constant research of performance, our engineering students strived to create a structure for the prototype which is capable of resisting extreme accelerations and intense vibrations while still being the lightest possible […] We analyzed step by step our structure and optimized the use of the prepreg carbon fiber material. The products identified as suitable for our case were the biaxial prepregs XC411 and RC200, whereas for the sandwich construction the M80 and M200 foams. After the design review, the final prototype structure reduced substantially its weight, down to one third from the EPFLoop prototype of 2018, while maintaining the safety level required by SpaceX.’
This story uses material from Gurit, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.
