In the previous lecture, Daan showed you some of the aspects of the structural design of the Hyperloop. Below, you will more information on this topic.

Materials
You already saw that alumium and carbon fiber are two very promising materials for the chassis of the Hyperloop. What we did not discuss yet, it that there are also many ways to produce parts from these materials.

First, let’s have a look at the two main carbon fibre production methods that are currently considered.

The first method is called Vacuum Infusion. The main concept here is to first lay down your carbon fiber layers, put them under vacuum and then use this vacuum to pull resin from an inlet to the outlet. The inlet is created by using chemically resistant tubes which allow the resin to flow from a reservoir to your product. There the resin spreads over the product until it reaches the outlet, which is made out of tubes that connect to a catch pot and eventually the vacuum pump.

The second method of producing is prepreg, which stands for pre-impregnated carbon fiber. As you can probably deduce from the name, we use carbon fiber plies that are already impregnated with resin in this situation. This means that you do not require an inlet and you also do not have to worry that the resin does not spread evenly. Still, you need an outlet towards a vacuum pump, since you need to apply an even pressure over your product.

Of course, there are many other production methods for carbon fibre. You can find an overview of those here. In case you want to learn more, there are many videos on YouTube on the different production methods where you can really see them at work.

Next we could, of course, consider the many production methods available for metals. However, this is out of scope for this course and thus we will not go into this. If you are interested, you can find a lot of information on these processes here.