Delft Hyperloop is a student team of 37 students from the Technical University of Delft.

We spent a full-time year on the design and production of the hyperloop pod, ATLAS 01. With this pod, we participated in the third SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition 2018 in Los Angeles, California.

Delft Hyperloop also participated in the first hyperloop pod competition and won this competition with the highest score on the sum of all categories.

The competition of this year was a little bit different. The only goal of this year was: top speed!

This also meant that every pod needed to have his own energy source and propulsion system. We decided to go for a high voltage battery and an electromotor.

The high voltage battery is designed and built in-house. The battery consists of a 180S4P lithium polymer battery. This battery is designed to be able to deliver 200kW of power at a maximum voltage of 750VDC.

Because this battery consists of a lot of dangerous batteries, a battery management system (BMS) was needed to keep everything safe and under control.

This year, the choice was made to go for an off-the-shelf BMS because there was already a lot to design. This off-the-shelf BMS is there to:

  • Measure the temperature of every battery cell
  • Measure the voltage of every battery cell
  • Measure the output current of the battery pack
  • Control the high- and low to chassis contactors
  • Control the pre-charge circuit

The BMS consists of a BMS-master and BMS-slaves. The master talks to the slaves over CAN to get the voltage and temperature of every cell. The PCB that holds the slave modules is produced by Eurocircuits. This PCB made the battery modules look organized and kept the measurement wires towards the battery cell tabs short. Below you can see some photographs of the boards.

After a lot of work, the 20 best teams from all over the world were selected to the competition week from the 15th till the 22nd of July.

With that last week, all the work came together in one final run, and we ended 2nd in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition of 2018!

Sjors Verkamman

PS. Also read our previous BLOG (Dutch)

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