rLoop is a non-profit, open-source, crowd-sourced think tank. The group was formed in June 2015 to compete in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. I was one of the founding members of the team and helped with its initial inception and growth. At rLoop I helped manage the various social media channels and worked on the design and programming of our Hyperloop pod. In 2016 rLoop members attended a design weekend for the competition where rLoop won an award for "Best Non-University Team at the Design Weekend." In January 2017 I attended the Hyperloop Competition 1, with many other rLoop members. At the competition, we were presented with an "Innovation Award" for our pod. During the competition weekend, I helped with the assembly and testing of the pods’ pressure and levitation systems.

Since my time on this team took place before and during my early university work it served as my first introduction to engineering. This also means that much of my work on the team was in concept and early design work, which is why I will talk primarily about that. Perhaps what I got most out of this competition was learning to work with a large group of engineers to overcome an incredibly complex problem in a relatively short amount of time. I was introduced to CAD for early design work and prototyped some design concepts. Although I did not write code for this project I did perform code reviews and learned a lot about C during this process. I was also introduced to a number of tools for online collaboration including JIRA, Confluence, GitHub, Slack, and Trello.

At the inception of the Hyperloop competition, the technology was still very much in its infancy. When we first started the design work on our pod we really wanted to analyze every aspect of the original 2014 Hyperloop concept. One of the key things that came out of this was our decision to use a magnetic levitation system which was never part of the original Hyperloop concept. The initial paper published by Elon Musk and engineers from SpaceX and Tesla aimed for a design using a compressor fan and a cushion of air to levitate and accelerate. The switch to magnetic levitation has since been adopted by most companies developing Hyperloop technology. To levitate a series of 8 Halbach array engines were used and wheels were used for startup and braking.

One of the key things that set our team apart was that we had a working pressure vessel. Theoretically, someone could have ridden onboard our pod inside the near-vacuum tube. This was a part of the original goal for the competition but all the 26 other finalist teams scrapped any plans of making a full levitating pod that could also contain a pressure vessel at 1 atm. Our success in this area is part of what led to us winning the Innovation Award at the competition weekend.

GAllery