Transcriber: Jay Jay Reviewer: David DeRuwe
In the summer of 1901, the Wright brothers were testing a glider
that they had designed.
It already included all of the knowledge that they had gained from previous designs
and already made it possible for them to fly for up to 120 meters.
However, the design also proved
to produce far less lift than the brothers had designed it for,
and it also proved to be incredibly unstable,
making it really, really hard for the pilots to control their aircraft.
So after many, many weeks of testing and crash landings,
a disillusioned and frustrated Wilbur allegedly told his brother,
“You know what, I think man will not fly in a thousand years.”
But as you all might know, only two years later, they did fly.
On the 17th of December 1903, the Wright brothers took off,
and they performed four controlled and powered flights
with their motorized airplane.
And, although the breakthrough is kind of widely known today,
the news did not really take off back then
when the brothers contacted the news about their success.
Even three years later, in 1906, French newspapers were still skeptic,
not believing the Wright brothers had really flown.
And from my experience,
we humans usually tend to think like the French newspapers did back then.
We might tell a colleague or a friend
that his or her ideas may be a bit far-fetched or even crazy.
Or like Wilbur, we sometimes even lose belief in our own ideas.
Because these ideas break out of the rules you’ve come to accept
about the world around us,
they challenge what we are used to,
and I think that we are making a mistake here.
I think that we should start giving these ideas a bit more chance, room to grow,
and also invest some effort into understanding their potential.
I believe that especially today, facing climate change,
it is crazy and maybe unconventional ideas
that can help us to create a more sustainable future.
So they matter more than ever.
Of course though, pursuing an unconventional idea
bears the risk that we might not end up where we initially wanted to go to.
We might not reach all of our initial goals.
But you will see that even if we don’t,
pursuing unconventional ideas still pays off.
During the last two years,
I dedicated my time and energy to work on an unconventional idea.
And as you heard, to me, this idea was the Hyperloop concept.
Now, I was so excited about working on this crazy idea
that I also decided to break out of the usual university schedule.
While in the first year, it was still possible for me
to kind of maintain everything that I had to do at university,
like going to lectures and writing exams,
I really wanted to go all in
and decided to pause my studies in mechatronics engineering
to work full-time on researching
and building a Hyperloop prototype in a student team.
But back to the Hyperloop - so what is it actually?
So the Hyperloop concept proposes the use of tubes
which hold a low-pressure environment
in which levitating capsules can transport cargo or people at ultra-high speeds.
The term Hyperloop was introduced by Elon Musk in 2013,
and it kind of revived earlier concepts of vacuum transportation,
some of which are already more than 200 years old.
The entire system is designed to reach airplane-like speeds
of 800 to 1000 kilometers per hour while minimizing the energy
that is needed to reach these high speeds.
Now, to put these velocities into perspective,
this would mean that, by Hyperloop, you could travel from Karlsruhe to Berlin
in about one and a half hours,
compared to the five and a half hours it will take you today.
And that’s nearly four times faster.
Three key technological elements
could make such a transportation system possible:
First up, a levitation system, a contactless propulsion system,
and, of course, the tubes which contain the low-pressure environment.
Instead of wheels, a levitation system keeps the pod suspended
at a constant air gap to the rail, using electromagnetic forces.
This makes sure that the pod can always follow the path of the tube
without ever needing to touch it.
And as there’s no direct contact to the infrastructure necessary,
the friction is also reduced,
therefore reducing the energy that is needed by the system.
A contactless propulsion system, usually billed as a linear electric motor,
can propel the vehicles, using electromagnetic fields.
And also here, as there’s no additional contact needed
to accelerate these capsules through the tube,
friction is minimized,
therefore also reducing the amount of energy that’s needed.
Lastly are the tubes that contain the low-pressure environment.
By using pumps, the air is removed from inside of the tube,
therefore also reducing the amount of energy that is needed.
As the density of the air inside of the tube is lower,
the pod also needs kind of less power to push through this air.
All three technological elements combined
have the potential to enable the transportation of people or cargo
at super high speeds while reducing emissions.
The first model suggests
that a Hyperloop would use about five times less energy than an airplane,
therefore significantly reducing transport emissions.
And I think that you can all agree that it’s kind of a cool vision, right?
Travelling insanely fast while keeping down emissions?
But to get there, there's also a lot that still needs to be done.
Technology must be developed.
Technical, but also geographical and economical feasibility of Hyperloop,
must be understood and examined.
And to do just that, to explore the potential of Hyperloop
and to demonstrate technologies that could one day be needed for such a system,
our founding team set out and started the student initiative mu-zero Hyperloop
here at the KIT in March of 2020.
And inspired by their will to kind of contribute something
to a more sustainable world, I joined them shortly after.
But you may ask, “So what happened since then?”
Well, we quickly grew into a team of about 70 voluntary students
from all kinds of disciplines.
We have engineers, designers, finance gurus,
all coming together to contribute to this crazy idea of floating capsules in tubes,
all brought together by the belief that we could do our part
and help to create a more sustainable future.
We worked in smaller subteams
to develop all the components that are necessary
to bring a small-scale Hyperloop to come to life.
We developed the necessary electronics
that read all of the sensors in the vehicle.
We wrote software to be able to safely control the pod.
And we also developed our own linear motor that can propel our vehicles
to more than 100 kilometers per hour
without ever needing to be in contact with the rail.
Over the course of a year,
the entire team worked tirelessly to get this prototype to come to life,
and that it did.
This is what it looks like when driving at a test track in Delft, in the Netherlands,
where we met and connected with other student teams,
who are also working on the Hyperloop concept.
Now of course, all of this would have been impossible
if everyone on the team had not believed in
or at least been curious about what Hyperloop could do to the world.
But we were curious, and we thought to ourselves,
“Hmm, Hyperloop, I will see what it is about.
Maybe it can bring us or also me personally forward.”
Only by giving this crazy idea a chance,
everyone on the team was willing to invest their time and their energy
and their knowledge into this project.
Had we not been determined
to bring this crazy idea a tiny, tiny bit closer to reality,
it would have been completely impossible for us to make this prototype together.
Now of course, you may ask, “Where is the tube and can I sit inside?”
And unfortunately, the answer is there is no tube for now,
and no, there’s really no space for you to sit inside our vehicle.
So as you can see,
we are still very, very far away from that original vision
that I told you about earlier.
And I also think, that at this point,
it’s still completely undecided whether or not Hyperloop can play
a significant role in our efforts to reduce carbon emissions ... sadly.
So does that mean it was all for nothing?
No, not at all.
Working on this crazy idea proved to be incredibly rewarding.
Teammates quickly became close friends,
and while we pushed ourselves to our own limits,
working on this crazy idea also gave us the freedom to just try it out.
It gave us the possibility to make mistakes in an environment
where they would not cost us a bad grade or a job even.
And you can imagine
a bunch of students trying to put together a Hyperloop prototype -
of course, we did make a lot of mistakes.
Only by that, we became more experienced and more capable young people
that now understand the challenges that come with developing such a system
and also with building an organization.
We learned to work in a team; for some of us, even to lead a team;
and we also improved our understanding of Hyperloop
and the hurdles it still faces.
Honestly for me, working in the student team
made me a tiny bit more optimistic towards the challenges we are facing today.
Working amongst all these brilliant young people,
I realized that everyone on the team cares about what they do.
We all want to contribute to a better world,
even if that means breaking the rules to pursue a crazy idea.
And I’m sure that, after this year, each and every one of us
will be able to start with more confidence into future projects,
now equipped with the tools and the knowledge
that are necessary to make it work.
I’m hopeful, and I think this is really the important part:
I’m hopeful that a lot of us will be investing their time and energy
to develop sustainable technologies that can empower us
to transition to a more sustainable humanity.
And I think that is worth quite a lot.
So I hope that you would agree with me
that giving this crazy idea a chance has really paid off.
As you know, scientists have shown
that our Earth, or more specifically, our climate, is changing rapidly.
The status quo of our way of living is hurting the planet,
and a change in the way we live is necessary.
And I think that, to tackle these upcoming challenges,
quite a few crazy ideas will be needed.
Crazy, unconventional ideas to challenge the way we see things today
can turn into powerful visions that can inspire others to change their behavior
for good.
So I want to encourage you to start believing again
into ideas and visions that may seem a bit unconventional in the first place.
And be aware, this is not only about your own ideas.
Giving other people’s crazy ideas a chance matters as much
as believing in your own weird ideas.
Of course for you, following an unconventional idea
can mean something completely different than building a Hyperloop.
I don’t want to encourage all of you to suddenly start building Hyperloops,
but maybe you have an idea
on how your company could improve its processes to cut down emissions.
Or maybe somebody from your team recently suggested an idea that you turned down
because it was too costly or too much work or simply too unconventional.
So I hope that the next time that somebody shares a crazy idea with you
or something comes to your head,
you don’t immediately try to suppress it
to continue with your daily business as soon as possible.
Because I firmly believe that to get to a more sustainable world,
a lot of changes, fueled by lots and lots of crazy ideas,
are needed to make it happen.
And I mean, who knows?
Maybe your idea will even be one of them.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]