234. AEROTRAIN
The Aerotrain is an interesting transportation idea currently being prototyped by Yasuaki Kohama and his group at Tohoku University in Japan.
The basic idea of the Aerotrain is to create a "levitating" train by using the aerodynamic principle of ground lift -- a phenomenon which boosts the lift of a wing when flying close to the ground. This makes it possible to achieve many of the advantages of a maglev train, without the expensive coils. A practical system could fly at speeds of 500km/h, while consuming about 1/2 to 1/3 the energy of the bullet train. The current goal of Professor Kohama's group is to complete a 350 passenger craft with a speed of 500km/h by 2020.
There is also a Quicktime video of the prototype here.
-- by JD
posted by JD @ 10:51 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
i'm sure this will get killed in various safety lobbies outside of japan. not to mention in the u.s. we're not even willing to give regular rail a try...
definitely cool tech tho.
Looks like a small version of the Russian TKV-34 running in a concrete trough rather than over water. A monster 'Wing in Ground Effect' transporter craft that does 310mph at a maximum height of 10 feet
http://www.aviationtrivia.homestead.com/34.html
chris l, why would this be incredibly safe? anything moving at that speed on a track is in danger of a fatal accident just due to a track malfunction.
i'm just playing devil's advocate but why is this different than regular rail? regular rail is more dangerous than aircraft travel per mile travelled source
personally i find both train and airplane travel to be much safer than driving, and will welcome a high tech rail system in the U.S. i think it would be awesome to be able to cross the country in 24 hours on a sleeper car.
i'm just anticipating the kind of resistance this sort of infrastructure investment will run into.
chris l, cool.
well to continue playing devil's advocate, i can imagine a lot of things going wrong, like debris in the trench, a wing breaking causing the train to fly into the air (ever see what happens to le mans cars when they lose their "wings"?), etc.
i'm not sure why i'm even playing devil's advocate. i totally love trains, have all my life, and would love to live in a world where travel was via some sort of train system.
i'm just skeptical that we'll see this kind of system in use in my lifetime.
An overground version of the Russian ekranoplan -- cool! If it is substantially cheaper than a high-speed maglev, then some countries (Europe and Japan, and probably China) will be interested in it.
They need to redesign the guideway so passengers have something to see out of the window, though.
I aggree with not being able to see out the window as a stubling block, plus the amount of land required for such a project.
Mark
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There's a cool video about experiments conducted in the sixties on several aérotrains. Check aérotrain on youtube:
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=5VvsxaaFNAs
At that time, those trains were powered by fuel and were declared less competitive than the TGV trains wich run on electricity coming from nuclear power plants. So the main drawback was the need of fuel. But solar panels seems a good idea.
The real problem is no "environmentalist" would allow such a track to be built anywhere.
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