Chinese researchers make car glide 35mm above ground in maglev test Chinese researchers levitated a 2.8-ton car 35 millimeters off the ground on a highway in east China’s Jiangsu province, state-sponsored media said over the weekend. The feat was accomplished by modifying an off-the-shelf car with a permanent magnet array and installing a corresponding conductor rail on 7.8km of road, thus …
coughbullshitcough
Nothing can be believed that comes out of China as "research". Not only that but they banned Twitter so why is that guy on Twitter. The CCP is full of double standards. Ban Tweet for its own people who seek the truth, but exploit western social media for their own bullshit propoganda.
Most of what comes out of the CCP is indeed bullshit, but I believe this since there's actually nothing really new here over any existing decades-old maglev system, and it's entirely impractical for any realistic use-case.
They just bolted some magnets on the bottom of a car and embedded a very wide corresponding rail in a test track. This is the kind of thing I'd expect from YouTube tinkerers in their garages. Do you remember all the levitating "hover board" videos we were subjected to seven years ago, in celebration of Marty McFly's visit to the future? Some of those were more advanced than this!
But yeah, this is just a PR/propaganda project to make CCP China look all sciency and technologically advanced - so long as you don't think too much about it (which most people don't).
Good point. The project itself was probably a fun idea by a bunch of students.
However, Twitter is banned and blocked in China. You cannot access it without a VPN. VPNs are also banned in China, with punishments including jail time. Thus, the only people in China who post to Twitter are 1) dissidents; or 2) government propagandists.
So we're only talking about this because it was seen as useful propaganda to push the CCP agenda of showing China to be technologically advanced.
Not surprising, if you remove all friction your car will indeed be pushed around by the slightest breeze! And there is little you can do about it besides putting said car on a rail, turning it into a train...
Without this it's like driving on exceptionally slippery ice, and while you can go quite fast with little energy consumption, you'll probably need a huge distance to slow down and turn. Not what one usually needs when driving in the streets... Which is why maglev is fine for trains, which are in total control of their environment and trajectory, but can't possibly work for cars which need to improvise a lot.
Also think about the investment/energy required to lay tracks on all (or even just the main) roads. Even if you only equip long distance highways (where it would make a little more sense), it would cost billions, and few would ever use it given the price premium of a maglev-capable car.
I used to have a neat Scalextric setup in my upstairs bedroom when I were a young'un.
Used to enjoy playing with it when I could.
Unfortunately because it used to cause such interference with the downstairs telly, I could only do it when there was nobody else home.
So basically twice a year :-(
Not as fast as a chopper --->
You're still wasting energy just keeping several dozen tons of train in the air just to reduce friction by a marginal amount (steel wheels on steel track are very low friction already). Maglev gains basically nothing over just laying high speed rail track. Cost per mile for the track and infrastructure is about the same but the running costs is actually lower.
Done correctly, energy is used mainly to lift the vehicle rather than keep it floating. I certainly agree it's not really suitable for cars - apart from the problems of laying the track, you've got all the as yet unsolved problems of having multiple vehicles on the same section of track.
Nevertheless, I'd expect the research to be useful in multiple ways.
> Maglev can be very efficient because you have much less wear and tear.
Still, wear and tear isn't the biggest expenditure on my car, even at it's ripe age of 15 years. It's not even in the top 5.
The problem with laying tracks under every road (or even just highways) is that it requires a truly colossal investment, something no nation could afford. And if you add the maglev parts to a standard car's price it becomes prohibitively priced. Not to mention much less attractive to use than a normal one, due to the additional space occupied and the strong magnets' effects on the passengers' belongings...
It's a lose-lose situation, the institutions managing the infrastructure lose, the end users lose, and inordinate amounts of energy are wasted just so a handful of wealthy technology fans can die in very spectacular accidents due to a light breeze...
Maglev uses very little energy on the hover - the Shanghai maglev only uses 15kW for that part
On the other hand it draws 8MW punching a train sized hole in the air at 263mph - and there were a LOT of noise complaints - so many that they had to dial the speed back and it only runs full tilt on the weekday afternoon runs from 2-4pm
There's a reason vactrains (hyperloop) keep getting attention. The engineering for a steel tube able to withstand 1atm is pretty easy/cheap and even if you only reduce to 100 pascals (not difficult with almost any pump) you'll drop the power requirement dramatically. A leak will act as a fairly dramatic airbrake without pancaking the passengers
For a 2.8 tonne car I was expecting some sort of presidential limo! If you have to stuff a plain saloon car with that much weight in magnets, where is everyone going to sit? I think the road (rail?) holding might bear some improvement for such a weight moving at any speed, too. On the other hand it seems churlish to criticize when it's clearly a demo, and we've got no dogs in this race.
We did have dogs in this race. I remember Linear motors demonstrated on Tomorrow's World in the late '60s/70s and Birmingham had a train running to the airport between @1985 and 1995..
Looks like the it all went to the dogs, though..... as usual..
>>>>> it's the flying jacket, with the Nedym..neodimi...neodimy..... magnets in the pocket..
I remember a boy at school making one for some A level. I saw it working, track was only about 30 feet and 'train' was maybe 18" long. As you can tell it was long time ago - pre-metrication. Yes it was a school with exceptional facilites and teachers but I wonder what the guy did, spend 50 years watching as no one got it to the mass market?
> For a 2.8 tonne car I was expecting some sort of presidential limo!
2800 kg is quite normal for a bigger family car. Its pretty much the mass of my (smallish) SUV, IIRC.
You're right about the space problems though, this should take quite some user space, especially given the car is already carrying its own batteries and there is no free unused space left.
Also make sure you carry no spinning rust hard drives! I don't think the magnetic field will be strong enough to do physical damage, but stuff you carry might indeed be "adversely affected".
> 2800 kg is quite normal for a bigger family car
Is it?
That over four times the weight of a BMC Mini. OK, not much passive safety kit there, but a heavy lump of cast iron for an engine.
It's almost three times as much as my nearly-new Renault Twingo, which has a full complement of NCAP stars.
There's no reason for a car of any size to exceed two tons. Even that's porky.
-A.
That over four times the weight of a BMC Mini.
Yep, and less than double the weight of a BINI. 50% more than a classic Range Rover or about the same as a new Range Rover. 6x a classic Fiat 500 or 3x a modern one. Way over double a Mk I Land Rover defender with a chassis like the Forth bridge or about the same as a new LR Defender.
There's no reason for a car of any size to exceed two tons. Even that's porky.
Modern cars are fat, bloated monstrosities.
No, I think that's everywhere, since most models are sold worldwide.
As "Gotno iShit Wantno iShit" said, modern cars are heavy, much heavier than the older ones. I don't know why, but each of my successive cars over the years has always been half a ton heavier than the one it replaced.
You could perhaps connect several elongated cars together, to carry many hundreds of passengers at the same time. With centralised control for safety, with some form of electronic signalling system.
For a cheaper version, replace the maglev with steel wheels on a smooth steel rail, one on each side of the vehicle.
For a cheaper version, replace the maglev with steel wheels on a smooth steel rail, one on each side of the vehicle.
Indeed, with the advantage that you then maintain compatibility with the existing rail infrastructure, so you can then run services quickly on the high speed line and slower on the older lines as direct services, rather than forcing people to change trains.
Just for the record the fastest conventional train is a test train on the then new LGV Est at 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph).
Yes, but that started suffering hunting oscillation (coning) and effectively destroyed both the pantographs and overhead wires in the process of setting that record
The practical limit of 350km/h (China) is based on trackside noise. They've found that even with maglev it's simply TOO DAMNED LOUD if you go fast that close to the ground
The Japanese maglev experiment has the same problem. Putting it in a trench hasn't really helped
To go faster, the track will need to be enclosed and evacuated
Not bother with the whole elevation/floating thing and instead focus on using maglev as a dragger? Leave the wheels alone and focus on just having the magnets drag the cars along?
Completely random thought and might not work but it feels like an easier problem to solve first.
The whole point is getting rid of the friction contact - monorails with small guide wheels were the traditional method of ensuring things followed a track but supercooled superconductors and oodles of refrigeration power can circumvent that design requirement as the system is self guiding. One reason why room temp superconductors may be a holy grail of transport technology.
One reason why room temp superconductors may be a holy grail of transport technology.
Outside the fevered imaginations of second rate sci fi writers, there is no reason to believe that these will ever exist. Even High-Tc materials are almost always used in LHe rather than LN2 because critical currents decrease linearly from 0K to critical temperature. In other words, something which superconducts up to 80K will carry about 25 time the current in LHe that it will in LN2.
To get a useful room temperature superconductor you would need a critical temperature of at least 500K and ideally 1000K. Ain't gonna happen.
As an amateur sometimes a writer that has done just that, I resemble that remark.
However, what about meta materials?
The thing I used in my story was graphene (I think).
Supposed to be a superconductor (I thought).
Anyroad, never underestimate somebody with wild eyes wearing a lab coat.
The Red Rail sees the train hover 30 feet above the ground with the track positioned above the vehicle.
I would hope that there are safety systems in place to prevent the cars from falling in the event of some sort of issue with the power or similar, but it seems that positioning the rail above the cars in a maglev system starts things off on the wrong foot. At best, it sounds needlessly complicated...
I did a couple of quick searches and found out this is being implemented in the north of China. They can have pretty strong earthquakes there. In the event of a collapse of this sort of system, the rail and accompanying support structure will land on the passengers, not the other way around. Not an ideal outcome.
It just an underslung monorail like the Wuppertal Schwebebahn – but with magnets! No danger of falling as the maglev system is contained in a conduit with just a slot for the connection to the car. There's probably wheels in there too, for low speed operation. I doubt the speed really justifies the expense of a maglev system but I suppose at least it will be quiet.
I suspect in the case of an earthquake it would be one of the safer places to be. At least it's should be properly engineered. There are plenty of buildings in China which aren't exactly built to modern safety standards.
The Shanghai Maglev is fun, I've used it a few times now. It's cheaper than a taxi from the airport into the city and a lot less scary. It finishes up at a Shanghai Metro station so if you plan in advance you can use that to continue your journey.
As for the car, the way to do that is to have a contoured field with two lines of magnets, one down each side, so there's enough field in the centre and moving to either side is a bit like climbing a hill, so the car will naturally stay in the magnetic depression.
"The Red Rail sees the train hover 30 feet above the ground with the track positioned above the vehicle."
The linked to article says 'Dubbed "Rainbow," the maglev line that is about 800 meters long was built in Xingguo County, east China's Jiangxi Province.' There is no mention of "Red Rail" anywhere in that article.
I rode the Shanghai maglev once - it isn't the quickest way to get to the airport because of connection issues (it's fastest just to stay on the subway that you need to take to get to the maglev station anyway), and there was nobody else in the front car on the train. I was surprised it was so old, the seats and curtains faded unevenly from sunlight. Max speed limited to 300 km/h, although a web search is packed with results claiming the full 480 km/h. It's kinda cool that they are actually running it though it feels more like a quaint working relic than bleeding edge tech.
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