Hyperloop students present to industry professionals and West Point

The Binghamton University Hyperloop team ended the academic year by presenting the team’s work to industry professionals at the 78th Annual New York State Association of Transportation Engineers Conference in Cooperstown, N.Y., and as part of the General Donald R. Keith Memorial Capstone Conference at West Point.

If you haven’t heard of Hyperloop yet, it’s is a mode of transportation where a pod travels in a tube similar to the pneumatic tubes at a bank drive-through. The Binghamton University Hyperloop team competes in an annual competition put together by SpaceX, which is founded by Elon Musk.

The interest in this new form of transportation means that industry professionals at the transportation conference were interested in learning more about what the Binghamton team had found. The students were the only non-professionals presenting at the conference.

Lecturer Kirill Zaychik from the Mechanical Engineering Department is the faculty advisor for the team had been invited to speak at the conference but gave the opportunity to the students as a networking and learning experience.

Given the audience at the transportation conference, the team answered very technical questions and received positive feedback on the presentation which described its experience of building a Hyperloop pod.

Similarly, at the conference at West Point, the students presented their project as part of a senior capstone competition, explaining the design process, the technical aspects, the end goals and the approach they used to create their Hyperloop pod.

Darren Silvanic, the industrial and systems engineering team lead for the team, was one of the students at the West Point conference.

“Our team was chosen by faculty at both West Point and Binghamton to attend the conference and present under the ‘Process Modelling and Analysis’ category,” said Silvanic.

“Boxu Zhu, Kasey Hill and I presented at the conference and were one of seven teams in our category and the only non-cadet team. We presented to a panel of three judges who were all West Point faculty and won the ‘Best in Track’ award. This means that our presentation was judged to be the best out of the seven teams that presented in our category.”

Zaychik said the team has been extremely popular among students but the project is a difficult one to work on.

“Every aspect of the Hyperloop is expensive at this point because it’s such a new thing. It’s also hard to test because we can’t just build our own test track,” explained Zaychik.

The team is now in its third year at Binghamton University and plans to continue for the 2018-2019 academic year.