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Levión is its name. It is the new prototype from the Hyperloop UPV team. A multidisciplinary team made up of 42 students from 20 different degrees. Every part, every component, has been improved. Levión has grown in length and width. It is half a metre longer than last year and almost a metre wider. This means it is nearly twice the size of the prototype two years ago. Its goal is to participate in the university competition seeking the transport of the future: high-speed ground transport in the form of capsules travelling through tubes.

According to Marcos Pérez, team captain, ‘this year's objectives are the booster, regenerative braking and the chargers’ and, of course, to repeat last year's victory. They were world champions at the European Hyperloop Week in Zurich, where they competed against the world's most prestigious technology universities. 'This year, we are going for it,' he adds. The competition will be held in Groningen (Netherlands) from 14 to 20 July, and the team will travel on 3 July to prepare everything.

The booster is a linear induction motor that runs on the track and produces an initial acceleration of the vehicle of 3 metres in less than 1 second, ‘which would be like going from first to fourth gear in a car,’ explains Pérez.

More sustainable

Another of the team's objectives is to be more environmentally sustainable, so 'we are looking to regenerate energy with each braking action to consume less,' adds the captain of Hyperloop UPV.

Finally, this year, ‘chargers will be implemented so that the batteries can be connected directly to the wall without having to be removed from the vehicle, which provides convenience and energy efficiency,’ adds Marcos Pérez.

The new prototype was unveiled on 20 June at an event presided over by the Rector, José E. Capilla, held in the Alfons Roig Auditorium of the Faculty of Fine Arts - UPV, in front of 300 people. You can watch the video of the presentation at this link.

During the presentation, they explained that more important than resources are ‘passion, perseverance and commitment.’ They also conveyed their experienced commitment to the importance of teamwork: "Hyperloop is a sum of voices, a sum of perspectives, where each person, in each subsystem, functions as a small cog that keeps the whole team running smoothly. If one fails, we all fail, but if we work in harmony, that's when the magic happens, when the eight subsystems of the team combine into one, into a vehicle, an infrastructure, a proposal".

Since 2014

Hyperloop UPV was born in 2014 with the purpose of meeting the challenge launched by Elon Musk through his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, to advance the development of hyperloop technology, thanks to its free hardware feature. The team's tutors are the professors Vicente Dolz, (Department of Thermal Engines and Machines) and Tomás Baviera, (Department of Economics and Social Sciences) from UPV.

The Future Concept (2016) was the prototype launched by this team that is part of Design Factory, the institutional platform of the UPV that promotes and supports the realisation of extracurricular activities, contributing to the formative development and acquisition of transversal competencies of its student body.

Carmen Revillo Rubio/ UPV Communication Area