Design and Production of Concrete Tubes for Vacuum Transportation Infrastructure

Abstract

This thesis reviews the benefits and requirements of using concrete to produce vacuum tubes for hyperloop infrastructure and it proposes a design for the case study of the EuroTube test site. Starting point is a design proposal using textile reinforced concrete that resulted from a collaboration of EuroTube and EPFL. Regardless, the engineering problem is approached from scratch, following a development process. After introduction of the problem and vacuum transportation as potential solution, the situation is analyzed by identifying the economic and technical key issues. Defining goals and targets leads to the development of an assessment methodology, with the help of which different existing pipe designs are reviewed. The tube design is then decomposed, and different options are explored and compared for the components. The production cost per meter tube is estimated quantitatively as the economic part of the assessment. The hard-to-quantify aspects regarding construction, operation and sustainability are graded qualitatively as technical part of the assessment. A design proposal results, that recommends using different materials for the two functionalities structure and impermeability. Concrete is found unsuitable to guarantee high performance regarding the latter. A polymercomposite liner is suggested to keep the air out and the tube joints are disintegrated from the shell. Both leads towards a more modular design, in which components can be independently improved through iterations, which is more adapted to a research and development process. At last, the proposed solution is compared to the existing steel and
the proposed textile reinforced concrete solution and found to be the cheapest and perform better than textile reinforced concrete tubes.