Dr. Drang:
Did Elon Musk overlook some structural details, like thermal expansion, concrete stress calculations, vibration issues under slotted designs, etc? Yes, he absolutely does. I view them as engineering problems, which are hard to solve & require extremely precise calculations with superior test data. But that is what structural engineers are for. He is not, I am; we are. We identify problems & solve. None of the engineering pioneers that we celebrate today captured all the problems of their design in their first iteration. It is their absolute focus on getting good people to find & solve those problems that made them what they are.
So, in short, while, I would join Elon Musk if I could in trying to find & solve most, if not all problems that a structural engineer can.
As I told my colleagues here at work, what Elon is proposing has huge engineering problems that need to be solved, but in essence they can be. It is the logistics of implementing such a project is a mess.
Neither of these is possible for the Hyperloop because the high speed of the capsule zooming along inside it means the pipe curves have to be very gentle. How, I wondered, is Musk going to solve the thermal expansion problem?As a structural engineer myself, I love what Dr Drang has to say in a lot of real life engineering problems. But, his view on Hyperloop is something I disagree.
The answer turned out to be simple: he didn’t. There’s some hand waving and, possibly, a complete misunderstanding of how thermal expansion acts, but no actual solution.
Did Elon Musk overlook some structural details, like thermal expansion, concrete stress calculations, vibration issues under slotted designs, etc? Yes, he absolutely does. I view them as engineering problems, which are hard to solve & require extremely precise calculations with superior test data. But that is what structural engineers are for. He is not, I am; we are. We identify problems & solve. None of the engineering pioneers that we celebrate today captured all the problems of their design in their first iteration. It is their absolute focus on getting good people to find & solve those problems that made them what they are.
So, in short, while, I would join Elon Musk if I could in trying to find & solve most, if not all problems that a structural engineer can.
As I told my colleagues here at work, what Elon is proposing has huge engineering problems that need to be solved, but in essence they can be. It is the logistics of implementing such a project is a mess.
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