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First Maglev To Be Built In China 185

Slack writes: "The Orlando Sentinal is reporting that China has signed a deal with a German consortium to build the world's first commercial train to float on magnetic fields."
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First Maglev to be Built in China

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  • There must be a pretty massive magnetic field for these to work, if there is a magnetic field, theres also and electric field.

    I wonder what the electromagnetic radiation level from this hover train would be compared to say a mobile phone.

    I guess a least its not concentrated at your brain. I would want some information before i would spend a lot of my time on one (driver, catering staff etc).
  • unlike the new leader of the free world....
    You forgot quotes around 'free'
  • They've got a huge dam, but they've also got a huge population! 1.000.000.000 / 600 = 1.7 milion rides... times 8 equals 13 million minutes which in turn equals 222 thousand hours which equals about 9000 days... It'll take ages before every chinese get's a ride at this thingy. And they all have to pay for it... Hmm. Strange, but communistic nonetheless..
  • Trains and planes both have very efficient engines

    Electric trains have much more efficient engines than planes. Jet engines are forced to incur a heat->work conversion, while electric motors generate movement directly with electromagnets (just a bit of electrical resistivity here, doesn't waste much power).

  • Well, my first real eye-opener was when I first came to Japan during summer vacation a couple of years ago; on my return trip from Akita (a prefecture in northern Japan) to Tokyo, a trip of about 660 km, the train left at 10:10 [IIRC] and was scheduled to arrive in Tokyo at 14:38. And whaddyaknow... when the train comes to a stop at the platform, my watch says 14:38:10.

    I've gone on various other long-distance trips since, and they've all been accurate to more or less the same degree. Some of the time schedules the station staff use even have seconds printed on them.

    --
    BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL

  • What's any of this got to do with nano-bots? Seems kind of off-topic if you ask me.
  • F1R57 M4GL3\/!

    That's about how intelligent the plan seems.
  • Actually, i just recently read about a study saying that a MagLev (TransRapid) connection between Amsterdam and Groningen (in the most northeastern part of the Netherlands) would be quite viable. I would certainly be nice if such a connection would be made (it takes something like 4 hours now for the 250-300 km)

    Though it would be a loss of connectivity... TGVs already go up to Amsterdam, it could be smarter to build a high-speed line that allows going south to Belgium and France (and west to London!) instead of switching trains at Amsterdam.

  • Wait for someone to clear the leaves of the track?
  • As funny as it would be to see people pinned to the floor of a maglev train by the magnets, it doesn't work that way. Nor will they erase magnetic media, etc., etc.

    I rode I maglev demo train at Expo86 in Canada and it was a super smooth ride with no magnet problems!
  • Yeah, the Transrapid is a German development - it's more like the Germans finally sold the thing to China (*that's* the achievement). Loads of resources were poured into developing this thing, and since the German Environmentalist Party blocked the planned Berlin-Hamburg line, the people who developed it obviously didn't want to simply drop the project. Germany has pretty good relations with China, and and the whole Shanghai thing got rolling when some of their top leaders came over to test-ride the train and liked it a lot.
  • It could make short-distance air travel obselete on any corridor where the maglev train is running.

    That's what it did in France : air traffic between Paris and Lyon has been almost killed by the TGV, and companies flying Paris-Marseille are expecting a major loss starting next summer, when the high-speed line extension is completed.

  • It's in the nature of fascist states to do this sort of project. Think of what Albert Speer wanted to build in Germany, bring it forward 50 years, plunk it down in China, and you have modern Chinese civil engineering.

    The Seven Gorges dam, this maglev, the threats to Taiwan, they're all symptoms of a sick society, a society run by an increasingly confused and out of control Maoist gerontocracy.

    First the civil engineering projects and the sabre rattling, then the invasion of neighbouring countries.
  • Why having a 1.5 GHz computer under your desk when you could browse the net with your old 60 MHz machine ? Are you geek or not?
  • > Ever thought over power consumation of this thing
    What makes you think MagLevs will consume huge amounts of power? Just keeping the train at a constant height does not take any power at all, whether it's done with wheels and a track or Magnets. (OK, so there is bound to be some loss, but with superconducting coils and whatever else they might be using its probably small)

    Also, when the thing stops it's kinetic energy does not just go to waste but is converted back into useful power, the train basically acts as a generator.

  • by gattaca ( 27954 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @01:17AM (#482667)
    Soft boil an egg.
  • then, thay have bridge-pilar contact...
  • In fact this maglev is built fist in China because the one planned for Germany is in serious troubles. The German gov is heavyly subsidizing this small track to make a proof of concept, and also in hope of getting bigger contracts against the French TGV (which use regular railtrack but is much more energy efficient, cheaper and also a bit faster).
  • by joe_fish ( 6037 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @01:21AM (#482670) Homepage Journal

    Not to knock the work being done in China, but they are not the first Maglev.

    Birmingham (UK, not AL) between the NEC exhibition centre and the train station. I'd guess it has been there for over 10 years. They announced plans in the middle of last year for a version 2 [necgroup.co.uk].

    --

  • Only 200 km/h ? that sounds quite small ! Is that cruse or top speed ? The TGV can speed over 520 km/h and the cruse speed is usually about 330 km/h.
  • Super conductors? Are there any superconductors that work at "room temperature"? Maybe I've been out of physics too long, but afaik there ISN'T any superconductor at "room temperature" wi`hich in turn means cooling, which in turn means power consumption, voila.
  • by Avalonia ( 169675 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @01:24AM (#482673) Homepage
    Birmingham Aiport (BHX) in the UK West Midlands sported a commercial operating Maglev between the terminal and the main-line railway station for eleven years. It has recently been replaced. There's a relevant Scientific American article [sciam.com] here.
  • Imperialist? Reality check- if you think the US behaves in an imperialistic manner, how do you think the Russians would behave these days if the US had backed down? Check your world history and note that it was SDI that broke the Russian spirit in the cold war. Not that SDI necessarily would have been effective, but the Russians spent FAR more on their military than the US did as a % of GDP. They simply could not afford to keep up the race as SDI was (is) going to cost a fortune. The US effectively outspent Russia. The same people that were cowering under the protection of the US through the past three decades are the same ones that whine today about US imperialism. The US would just assume avoid another cold war (or a hot one for that matter).
  • I can tell you how fast you were going. The IC3 trains which you were no doubt using has a top speed of 180km/h. Since you happened to travel on some of the most used tracks in Denmark, you were doing close to that for a large part of the journey. Racing the train is quite a challenge these days.

    In the tunnel under Storebaelt you were doing 140km/h. The last part of the journey was on lower quality tracks, typical speeds 100-120km/h.

    By the way, the Lyntog which stops at fewer stations can make the journey in ~3h15m.

    Benny

  • Um, no. You might notice that magnets attract metal no matter which pole it is.
    They'd have to be wearing strong magnetic rings (but then the rings would prolly just turn around to attract the magnets anyway).
  • Transrapid is the worst maglev system you can conceive. Their system relies on attraction which changes exponentially as the magnets move closer together or further apart. That means the control circuitry has to be spot on to keep the train the correct distance from the track. Moreover, the track has to be very carefully built and can't allow for much settling.

    Powell and Danby, the original inventors of maglev, have come up with enhancements to their original patents involving quadrature magnets that achieve several goals:

    1. The magnets, unlike Transrapid's, are arranged to repel each other so the system self-stabilizes.
    2. The quadrature windings are layed out so the magnetism within the cabin is no higher than background magnetism.
    3. The magnets are arrayed across the entire train floor so loading isn't limited to a few outboard magnets. That means more even loading.
    4. The even loading means very low track flexing as the train passes over which translates into very low track wear.
    5. The trains can be configured to carry fully loaded trucks as well as people. That option which is not possible in the original design that was implemented by the Japanese, means that freight charges can make the train self-supporting. They estimate that they can carry trucks at 6 cents/ton-mile vs. 30 cents/ton-mile it costs to drive the truck on an interstate.
    6. The best comes last...build a trans-continental tunnel and evacuate it. Accelerate the maglev train at .2 gee for 10 minutes, coast for 25, decelerate at .2 gee for 10 minutes. You've used the equivalent of 20 gallons of gasoline and moved 1000 people from San Francisco to New York in 45 minutes. If you use $7 million/mile to cost the tunnel (about what the Swedes just paid for >40km tunnel) you're looking at about $14 Billion to build the tunnel shell. That's less than 1/3rd the cost of the initial estimates for the National Missile Defense Rumsfield wants to build and we end up with something the country can actually use.
    The trans-continental tunnel option is a future that simply isn't available for steel wheels on steel track trains and blows away any envisioned air transport.
  • Can't reach that URL.

    You don't say it, but I have the impression from other posts that the replacement isn't Maglev.
    Any ideas why ?
    I could access the URL and it has been replaced by a shuttle bus. Reason being that shuttle busses are cheaper to run, more reliable and easier to fix when they do break.
  • Where did you get #6 from? I would love to read more about this if it is really a possibility ...
  • Lowly Pittsburgh is actually one of two finalist (with D.C.) to get a maglev commuter train built. It would run for 45 miles between the cities of Greensburg, Monroeville, Downtown Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Airport. I could get to work from where I live near Monroeville in about twenty minutes instead of the hour the bus takes right now. And most of that twenty minutes would be the time to get to the station I think the train would only be 7 minutes, to go 15 miles.
    But since it took almost thirty years to get a pedestrian bridge built across the Allegheny from the point to 3-Rivers Stadium (just in time for it to be demolished) I don't have much faith that this will ever happen. But anything that would cut down on car/truck traffic waiting to go through the the Squirrel Hill and Fort Pitt tunnels would be great for the Air Quality here. Every single work day cars back up for at least six miles, stopped, waiting to go through the Sq. Hill tunnel, with most cars occupied by only one person.
    There's a FAQ about the project here: http://post-gazette.com/regionstate/20010119qa3.as p
  • Japan had the High Speed Surface Transport train at Expo86 in Vancouver, BC, Canada wich was a maglev system. Heck, I *rode* in it, so this is definatly NOT the first maglev system.

    Go to google and search for "expo hsst" ;o)
  • it only takes 165 seconds (or 16km) to reach 430km/h

    Heh. Ok, so it takes 16km to reach top speed. How long does it take to stop from it's top speed? I'd hope it takes less than 4km, otherwise they're never going to reach top speed in China, what with their 20km track and all.
  • Don't forget that the train itself will probably be computer controlled

    More like remote controlled. The track is the engine, the train itself doesn't have to have a lot of technology inside. You could rip out all technology but the magnets out of the train and it would still go full speed. It has to have batteries (for stops) and induction wires (powered from the track) to get any power at all for inside lighting etc.

    If the train is piloted (it probably will be, it's a passenger psychology thing), then all commands go to a base station which controls the track.


  • >not that the communist government would give a damn about environment anyway
    unlike the new leader of the free world....


    Let me think.
    The new leader of the free world, and they think about the enviroment.
    Must be the EC, because the US is one of the largest poluters on earth.
  • by batobin ( 10158 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @12:42AM (#482685) Homepage
    I just feel sorry for the poor bastards who dress gothic style and wear lots of metal. They're fine until the train starts up... then all of a sudden they're pinned to the floor the train wishing they'd never had those 15 nose-rings put in.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Magnets are designed to attract. Not repel
  • But unfortunately, not linux.
  • They have a bilion people to move around bilions of square km's and they build a 20 mile line for 600 people?

    I live in the Netherlands, and over here they will not build a maglev from one side of the country to the other because the distance is to short! Thats 300 km! (Yes, I know, small country :-) )
  • Yes, but...
    First Maglev to be Built in China
    ...the item is clearly talking about the first MagLev to be built in China.
  • ..I've always loved the idea of these things, though I imagine [living in Britian] that i'll never get to see one ;o(

    I know it's a little naive, but is anyone else suprised that this is happening in China? I know they've got a space program etc etc but I have a real problem thinging of it as a high tech nation.

    What sort of speeds are we talking for this?
  • The Blaine the Mono you're talking to is already 800 miles away, under the city communicated by encrypted microburst radio.
  • here is a link [transrapid.de] to the transrapid web site.
  • There must be a pretty massive magnetic field for these to work, if there is a magnetic field, theres also and electric field.
    Not necessarily - the permanent magnets hanging on your fridge dont emit any electromagnetic ratiation, otherwise you have a perpetual motion machine - stick an aerial next to the magnet, collect the energy and there you have it - no more problems in california!
    Unfortunatly, the us patent office no longer accepts patents for perpetual motion machines, otherwise ....
  • Don't they have one in London. I thought the Docklands Light Railway was a maglev.
  • >>What sort of speeds are we talking for this?

    uhm, about 350-360 peak
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25, 2001 @01:34AM (#482696)
    The sound of self-interest and hypocrisy is nipping at my eardrums. Let's start with self-interest. Transrapid reckon this stuff is
    • Safe. Yeah, right. Until the power goes off
    • Energy efficient. Not unless you think squandering MW on keeping the levitation coils going is a good use of energy
    • Slow (or slower than the alternative) because for every small increase in speed you need a disproportionate increase in magnet current to keep the thing stable
    Of course they have to say that because they have such a huge investment in old and essentially useless tech.
    In fact, there is a magnetic levitation tech which is safe and energy efficient.
    • It relies on coils in the track (closed loops, unpowered) and magnets on the train.
    • The train has small wheels which it rides on until it reaches a critical velocity (around 30 km/h) above which the eddy-currents induced in the track coils generate enough of a repulsive force to lift the train.
    • Mount coils and magnets horizontally and vertically in sidewalls and you get to go around corners safely too.
    • The faster it goes, the more induced magnetism it generates, the more it holds itself stable
    • Propulsion is by some kind of small jet/fan.
    Safety is assured because there is no electric current to get interrupted.
    Check out Scientific American late last year for an article on this.
    The hypocrisy comes from the Chinese (surprise!). How could this possible be a demonstration of China's technical prowess? A demonstration of Germany's perhaps, but not China's.
  • Yeah, wouldnt this make a mess of hard-disks and other electronica?
  • "..I've always loved the idea of these things, though I imagine [living in Britian] that i'll never get to see one ;o( "

    What, a train? I`m sure they`ll be back to a `normal` service soon. :)

    I have to say, spending xmas in Denmark last year (rather than the UK, where i live), was amusing - getting a train that ran from one end of Denmark to the other (Randers -> copenhagen), on christmas day, and leaving/arriving within a minute of its scheduled time, was a new experience for me! Can`t we do *anything* right?
  • Ehmz no. Does the name 'Faraday' ring a bell?
  • One at Birmingham Airport and one at Gatwick. There used to be a third, in London, but it was replaced a few years ago because maintaining the one-of-a-kind system was too expensive.

    Disney wanted to build a maglev from the Orlando airport to Disney World, bypassing all competing attractions in the area, but even Team Rodent couldn't get that through the Florida legislature.

  • Sure you can just go out and buy a copy of pokemon gold or silver then you can see a maglev every time you play.
  • Actually, I do know that Eurostar has now nearly twice the people going between London and Paris as flying between London Heathrow/Gatwick and Paris/Charles de Gaulle airports. Eurostar is one reason why the hovercraft that used to ply the English Channel no longer do so. :(

    The trip between London and Paris by Eurostar will be reduced by nearly 38 minutes when the new high-speed line from London's Waterloo International Station to Folkestone (the English side entrance to the tunnel) is completed in 2002.

  • Like the article said, there are serious concerns about the efects on local flora and fauna . . . and these will lead to human injuries

    It can be expected to attract iron-rich plants, such as spinach. This in turn will attract cute little bunny rabbits. When the bunnies eat too much of the spinach, they will become stuck to the tracks.

    With such easy targets, larger carnivores such as wolves and lions will be drawn to the area. After too many of these meals, they to will stick to the tracks, causing the train to derail.

    Stop maglev now!

    Oh, and think of the poor survivors, waiting for rescue, with no food but the spinach and bunnies. They'll have to shut off the electrical grid for half of Europe to unstick them from the tracks . . .

    :)
  • Nationalism has replaced communism as the national ideology. Big projects (and rhetoric about attacking Taiwan) stir nationalist feelings, and lead the people to support the nationalist (not the Nationalists in Taiwan) -- i.e. the "Communist party".

    willis.
  • Woah there, don't forget that most electric power is generated via a heat to work conversion innitially. Add that factor in and things don't look quite as good.

    Mind you large central generators are more efficcant then most engines, but there is also power line loss.

  • 11 May 2015 Maglev connecting LA and San Francisco opened to the public.

    14 May 2015 Press Scare Stories about possible health effects of high intensity magnetic fields.

    17 May 2015 First lawsuit against the maglev operating company by a person who claims it gave him brain cancer.

  • Actually, they have done several tests of the Transrapid system where they abruptly shut off the power at high speed. The train(s) has rubber skids or wheels (I get confused between the German one and the Japanese one) that bring it safely to a stop.
    I'm not sure about the energy efficiency of the Transrapid, but the Japanese maglev testbed uses superconducting magnets, and is very efficient. Only trouble is keeping the superconductors cool. I think the ones the Japanese use need to be around the temp of liquid CO2, which escapes me at the moment. The Transrapid, however, uses normal magnets.
  • Speaking of MagLev, there was supposed to be a ballot issue in November 2000 for the construction of a high speed rail system in California. I think it has been pushed back to 2001 (the ballot issue, that is), anyone know more about it? IIRC, they were looking at eitehr standard electrical traction (steel-wheel-on-rail), which they were estimating would cost around $21 billion, or a MagLev system that would cost around $27 billion. Oh, hey, check out www.cahighspeedrail.org [cahighspeedrail.org] if you are interested.
  • Yeah! Next thing you know, they'll be indistinguishable from the US! (Well, ok, we don't have a Maoist gerontocracy ...)
  • >If you decide how technologically advanced a society is by the kind of
    >trains it uses, how do you think the US would do ?.

    Quite well. Most of ours fly at about mach .75 . . . :)

    More seriously, though, for the most part the U.S. isn't dense enough
    for trains to be practical, though there are notable exceptions.

    For that matter, we only have a half-dozen to dozen cities where local
    mass transict *can* be practical.

    hawk
  • That page says that it is bad that the TransRapid doesn't mix with the normal trains. However I'm not sure this is true.

    Faster trains inside Germany often suffer from the problem that passengers want a fast point-to-point connection, but that the connection is slowed down by stops in other cities that are in between, and by long-winding paths into the city, like in Frankfurt, where the trains practically spiral into the city.

    Well, but I don't know whether that is enough arguments to build a new rail system.


  • Boone, Iowa used to be a major rail center--three lines crossed there, or some such. Today, their rail preservation society (or whatever) operates what they claim is the last production built coal-fired steam engine--it was built in China.

    So on weekends in spring and summer, you can go to the only stop, catch a ride on an honest-to-God steam engine, and leave smiling, but with flecks of coal all over your clothing . . .
  • you're right. We are now experiencing a dubious, obscure theocracy that wants to go back to the times of inquisition.
  • Power consumption per passenger is in about the same range than for the usual Diesel powered CalTrain Unit.

    Gruss H.
  • The series 500 Shinkansen actually has a top speed of 320 km/h on the current tracks (they hope to push this to 340 km/h by improving the tracks) and it's a Shinkansen that holds the world record for the fastest scheduled ride. The Shinkansen was the first high speed train when they started the service in 1964. The first TGV was 1980. Doesn't seem to have been copied to me...
  • Thats 300 km!

    You have to say 186 miles as well, or lots of people won't know.
  • if there is a magnetic field, theres also and electric field

    That doesn't have to be the case, it all depends on how you create the magnetic field. A magnetic field on its own doesn't have anything electrical about it unless you move a coil through the field. Then you are creating electricity, the principle of the dynamo. But thats pretty hard to compare with a mobile phone; thats a totally different story.

    The next thing you are totally forgetting is Faraday. If you're inside a metal train then the electro magnetic fields generated by this train (remember; the tracks aka bottom of the train is where the actions at) will surely have a hard time reaching you. Thats first class Physics (I do hope I got the verb right :)); the cage of Faraday.

  • by Grab ( 126025 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @01:58AM (#482718) Homepage
    Who's read Stephen King's Dark Tower books? Anyone thinking Blaine the Mono?

    Grab.
  • I've always loved the idea of these things, though I imagine [living in Britian] that i'll never get to see one ;o( I know it's a little naive, but is anyone else suprised that this is happening in China? I know they've got a space program etc etc but I have a real problem thinging of it as a high tech nation.

    Remember that it has the second largest economy in the world (after the US). And the government is not democratically accountable to the people, so it has much more freedom to spend on big projects. (Witness the big projects which Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore have commissioned in the past).
  • They have a billion people to move around billions of square km's and they build a 20 mile line for 600 people?

    This sounds like the Chinese will propably only buy this from the west, reverse-engineer the whole thing and start later building new rails and trains on their own. Think about the difference between the price of a train built by german or chinese engineers. Wages are a bit lower in China, so they will save $$ this way.

    The chinese politicians don't have to explain this kind of spending to the voters. That's why maglevs are not common in Europe or USA. The track would not be operational at next election, so you would not get elected if you spent public money on this kind of projects instead of tax cuts.

  • we are waitng for diesels to come into service, but we have been promised 2050 at the earliest

    Any of our trains scheduled to arrive by 2050 is unlikely to be seen before at least 2230, at least not in one piece. Wait for the apology (if they bother): "we are sorry for the slight delay to your journey ... this is because we are unable to locate the driver." They really say that quite often!
  • That's even worse. When they shu it off, the poor bunnies will fall from the track and bump their fuzzy little heads :(

    hawk
  • Does the name 'Faraday' ring a bell?

    You're thinking of Quasimodo - Faraday was the guy who liked putting things in cages for their protection (e.g. from electromagnetic fields.) ;-)
  • by Glowing Fish ( 155236 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @02:23AM (#482738) Homepage

    A group of Slashdotters actually had the first bid for the job, and were going to build it for much cheaper out of legos and potatos, but the deal fell through when they ran out of 2*3 flatsies.

  • by Jeff Kelly ( 309129 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @03:24AM (#482743)
    Its a relief to finally see someone built such a thing. After more than twenty years of research and more than 20.000.000.000 DM of taxpayers money put into this, our new Government very nearly cancelled the whole thing. Mind you not because the Construction of a Transrapid connection between Berlin and Hamburg would be too expensive (Actually it would cost not much more than an ICE connection (Germanies High speed train)) but because the Environmentalist Party in Germany (which governs our Land in Association with the Sozial-Democrates) blocked the Project due to environmental concerns. But If you do not believe in such High tech yourself, How do you think someone else will buy it. (If we had a working Transrapid connection, we would have sold the Technology long ago to several other countries including the Netherlands, Japan and the U.S.) But politicians only see the cost of a thing and whether or not it brings the voters favour to them, but not how much money they could make out of such an investment. Regards Jeff
  • You'd think the magnetic fields would mess up electronics and other items that rely on magentic items wouldn't you? But have a think - power stations use electronics and computers don't they? They also have v.v.v.big magnets in the turbines/generators. So why don't their systems get corrupted?

    Simple - insulation. Add wads of lead/concreate (okay, can't use that in this situation) or thick clumps of wires to help 'reduce' the magnetic fields.

    Don't forget that the train itself will probably be computer controlled and the train company will have to take into account passengers with pacemakers (pacemakers and radio/magentic fields don't get on) - so don't worry about your laptop.


    Richy C.
  • The trains in japan use conventional engines to gain speed, then use magnetic fields for propulsion. The german transrapid is so far the only train that manages to do everything the maglev way.

    Interesting tidbit: Germany wanted to build a Transrapid (their name for the maglev train) track between Hamburg and Berlin. They cancelled this, however, because of public resistance and the immense cost involved.

    It's too bad, I'd really have liked to see it.
  • Yeah, too bad...it was going to be powered by the environmentally clean hot air from flamers and trolls...
  • Actually, Paris-Lyon is short-distance enough that a TGV does make sense, because I believe it takes about 2.5 hours nowadays to travel that distance by TGV.

    It'll be interesting to see how much air traffic between Paris and Marseille is affected once the TGV line from Paris to Marseille allows for all high-speed running.
  • ``The maglev train will act as a model to display the high-tech achievements of Shanghai"

    I am rather confused. I agree that this would show the world that they are tech minded, but how does it show their high-tech achievements when the train is designed and the train cars built by a German company?
  • by dhovis ( 303725 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @07:37AM (#482762)
    I don't think anybody has mentioned this so far, so I will.

    There is a group at Lawrence Livermore National Lab [llnl.gov] that is working on a totally new MagLev system. It is called Inductrak [llnl.gov]. What is unique about this system is that it uses totally passive technology.

    It works by lining the center of the track with passive copper coils and lining the bottom of the train with Hallbach magnets. These Hallbach magnets have two interesing properties. One, they create a sinusoidally varying magnetic field, and two, the poles are aligned so that the magnetic field above the cabinet (i.e. where the passengers are) completely cancels out. What this means is that as the sinusoidally varying field passes over the passive coils, the coils create a repulsive field, but only so long as the train is moving. When the train slows down to below a few miles an hour, it will settle back down on the normal tracks.

    The people who are developing this system are now working on a scale model with NASA for possible use in rocket launches.

    But the real upshot to this sort of system, as opposed to the system mentioned in the article (Dynamic EM) or other such systems (Superconducting EM) is that the levitation system does not require precice computer control. With either of the other systems, a contol failure could cause a fatal accident. With Inductrack, the worst case scinario is a propulsion failure, in which case the train would simply continue floating until it slows down enough to land on the rails again.

    The control issue is one of the major problems that have held back the deployment of large scale MagLev systems for decades. I think that this passive technology is probably going to prove to be the way to go. (IMHO, YMMV, etc.)
    --

  • Not to knock the work being done in China, but they are not the first Maglev.

    Birmingham (UK) isn't the first maglev either. To quote from the Transrapid web site:

    1979

    Operation of the world's first maglev train with longstator propulsion (Transrapid 05) to be licensed for passenger transportation occurs at the International Transportation Exhibition (IVA 79) in Hamburg.

    Check out the Transrapid web site (English and German) at transrapid.de [transrapid.de]
  • by LarsWestergren ( 9033 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @03:47AM (#482770) Homepage Journal
    The majority of the Chinese Communist Party stopped being communist almost 20 years ago if you look at the economic perspective (even though some hardline conservatives keep trying to turn back the clock). They have quietly drifted closer and closer to market economy, even though the official media keeps spouting tired old cliches like "The march towards true socialism continues!".

    However, some things are harder to let go of. Criticism of the party is still stomped down on HARD, as are all suggestion of a multi-party democracy. Also remaining is a fondness for the old Stalinist type mega-projects. Big is beautiful. Damn the environmental consequences or the fact that smaller projects would make more economic sense. It seems China still suffers somewhat from an inferiority complex and therefore see a need to bolster their national pride with these absurd projects that are an enormous waste of money. The most obvious example is the Three Gorges Project, the world's largest dam.

    Corruption, bureaucracy, environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale, *millions* of people homeless, expensive electricity and a dubious safety record. When (if) it is finished, I wouldn't want to live downriver from it for all the whisky in Ireland.

    ************************************************ ** *

  • It takes 8 minutes - Rather than the 12 or so that a conventional railway will take. What to do with all this saved time?
  • Does anyone know of a study about how much fuel / passenger various types of transportation methods use? I mean, for a given distance, how much energy is used to get one passenger from A to B for planes vs. trains. vs. cars vs. ships? I know this varies by type of plane etc. but some kind of ballpark figures would be interesting. One would think a train at 350km/h is much more fuel-efficient than a plane at 900km/h but who knows.. For short trips when a proportionally large amount of time is spent on crowded airports and during takeoff and landings, the time difference should also not be so significant vs a train that gets you from A to B without delays and without holding patterns.

    In slightly unrelated news, be sure to checkout Microsoft's upcoming train sim at http://www.microsoft.com/games/trainsim ! It looks like something every train fan out there would dream of!
  • Spinach? Everyone knows that wabbits like _carrots!_

    I can just imagine a modern Bugs Bunny - tunnelling all over China, pops up just as the train goes wooshing by, flattening his ears straight back behind him, and says, "I _knew_ I should've made that left toin at Albuquerque..."

    Just then, a Chinese hunter comes by...
  • Trains and planes both have very efficient engines, and expend almost all their thrust overcoming air resistance. Trains also lose a little in rolling resistance and some to turbulence because they are close to the ground. Planes move faster, and must waste some thrust on lift, but travel through less dense air. Trains have denser air at slower speeds, and can pull more people behind one front cross-section (in other words they are longer). Cars are way less efficient in all respects, but move much more slowly.
  • *bzzzt*

    The Transrapid is not using superconducting coils - but conventional e-magnets instead (combined lift and propulsion system). If there is a power outage it will drop onto its carbon-fibre braking sleds after the internal, constantly re-charged batteries have run dry.

    More info on the (German language, sorry) Transrapid project page:
    http://www.mvp.de/

    A few facts: 128m length for 562 passengers, it only takes 165 seconds (or 16km) to reach 430km/h due to its ~25MW power linear motor. The energy consumption and noise is measurably lower than a comparable train (German ICE, French TGV, Japanese Shinkansen).
  • Japan is already too advanced in their own maglev project. They already have a good section of it, on which they have been conducting experiments, and I find it difficult anything China starts doing _now_ will get finished before the Tokyo-Osaka line.
  • by krystal_blade ( 188089 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @03:20AM (#482806)
    China also announced today that not only are they going to build the worlds first Maglev train, which promises to reduce pollution via mass transit;

    They have also announced that they are beginning the development of the automobile, which they say promises to produce much more pollution (with which, of course, future maglev trains will spawn) than their current ECO-threatening device, the bicycle.

    krystal_blade

  • seems to be kind of neurotic about their status as an international industrial power.

    Completely unlike USofAmerica's obsessive neurosis with convincing themselves they are the most mighty, free and wealthy nation... of which only one is debatably true: mighty*. 'Freedom' in America is a popular myth and we all know that Canada has the highest standard of living in the world - I think the USofA falls about 5th (maybe 3 or 4th..). *There would probably be other 'mighty' nations if they spent the kind of money that your Industrial Military industry demands, and if they had the kind of Imperialist goals of the USofA.
  • No, the japanese bullet trains do not run on maglev at all.

    The japanese *do* have a maglev project, though, and they have a few miles of it they use for various tests.
  • According to the Transrapid info web page (German language) http://www.mvp.de/tr/eigen.html [www.mvp.de] the system is ~6dB less noisy (1/4 perceived loudness) than a TGV or an ICE at same speed. At the same noise level the Transrapid can go ~100km/h faster than TGV or ICE.

    The electric/magnetic field is comparable with a TV set in 3m distance - so not much. Depending on the Transrapid generation you either have high voltage lines within the rail (old) or static magnets for inductive energy transfer (new).

    The trick with the latter: you only have a static local magnet field. The (fast) moving Transrapid percieves this local field as alternating magnetic field which is converted to electricity to power the carried batteries. No (dangerous) high voltage lines, no alternating magnetic fields.

  • More correctly, the presence of a changing magnetic field requires the presence of an electric field, and vice-versa.

    Aside for people who've taken calculus based physics: If you remember the Maxwell equations, you should remember that there are four of them: two of them tell you how static charges give rise to E and B fields, and two that tell you how moving charges give rise to E and B fields, and additionally, how a time-varying E field gives rise to a B field and vice-versa. See, for example, Eric's Treasure Trove [treasure-troves.com]

    Furthermore, there are some points about Faraday cages that you are missing: firstly, as another poster mentioned, any holes will reduce the effectiveness of the cage. Secondly, even a very good cage only keeps out static fields; time-varying fields penetrate into cages to a degree that depends on their frequency. For this, you'll need to check out an advanced undergraduate or graduate E&M text (such as Jackson). This is why, for instance, you can listen to the AM radio while riding in your car, and why you can talk on your cellphone inside an elevator (which are generally excellently well closed Faraday cages).

  • by RayChuang ( 10181 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @04:33AM (#482825)
    I think while it's nice that finally we'll see a major commercial application of maglev technology, the problem is that the cost of a Transrapid maglev on a per kilometer basis is WAY too expensive for what it does.

    Already, a breakthrough announced in late 1999 promises to make Transrapid obselete; a bunch of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers trying to develop a better way to launch rockets into space cheaply came up with maglev system that uses mostly cheap permanent magnets to move the train along without the very precise engineering that the Transrapid needs.

    They're now in the process of scaling up the technology to see if it will work on a larger scale; if it does, the US could actually take the lead on maglev research since the US will have by far the least expensive technology necessary to build a maglev train that goes between 400 and 500 km/h (248 to 310 mph).

    Maglev's could drastically change transportation as we know it. Imagine going from downtown Chicago to downtown Minneapolis in under two hours, or Atlanta to Miami via Orlando, FL in just under three hours. It could make short-distance air travel obselete on any corridor where the maglev train is running.
  • Actually, I think you can. They have visiting days or something like that, and I think there are periods where one can actually catch a demonstration ride.

    Of course, there isn't much of a point in catching a train that only stop at one station. :-)
  • For that matter, we only have a half-dozen to dozen cities where local mass transict *can* be practical.
    For conventional public transit, I think that is probably correct. I mean, I live in Chicago, which would probably be one of those cities, and it's still rather crappy. They are going to spend $380 million dollars renovating 6 miles of the El. That's insane. That's a tremendous waste of money.

    However, I don't think things are entirely lost. I really think Personal Rapid Transit could work in most US cities. The quick summary, is small cars (one to three people) running on elevated tracks (but very small tracks, since the vehicles are light), with automated navigation (which is really easy, unlike cars, because they are on tracks).

    The great part is that it doesn't require any special technology. It uses wheels, electric motors, and tracks on stilts. Nothing very expensive. Only the automated navigation is slightly technologically difficult, but I think that is quite doable. Even running at 30 or 35mph, it's still far faster than other forms of public transportation when considering the total travel time (including waiting, transfering, and walking to your final destination). In Chicago, it would be faster than driving most of the time.

    People are of the perception that public transit has to be high-volume to be efficient, but that's not really the case -- if you can move people in a more parallel fashion, it can be efficient on a smaller scale. In this case, you don't stop until you get to your destination, and the cars can run fairly close together.

    Sadly, governments just keep putting money into light rail, which is a complete waste. I wish it wasn't so -- but it just doesn't work, it's too slow, too irregular, and doesn't get people where they want to go.

    Anyway, for someone who is interested in PRT, there's information to be found at Taxi 2000 [taxi2000.com] (well, that name doesn't make sense anymore, does it?) and Citizens for PRT [cprt.org].

  • by pmc ( 40532 ) on Thursday January 25, 2001 @01:06AM (#482830) Homepage
    And also excluding the actual first one, which was in the UK connecting Birmingham airport to the city centre. This was in 1984 (and it is now closed).

    Ho hum, another non-story.

  • know it's a little naive, but is anyone else suprised that this is happening in China? I know they've got a space program etc etc but I have a real problem thinging of it as a high tech nation.

    That's probably why they're doing it. China seems to be kind of neurotic about their status as an international industrial power. Witness the Great Leap Forward, where they tried to form an industrial base overnight (making farmers give up their fields to build "backyard furnaces" for steel production) or the Three Gorges Dam.
    --
  • It means the line has 50% more capacity. It may also create considerably less noise at high speeds, which both passengers and nearby residents probably appreciate.

If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro

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