Hyperloop Poland, a company established by engineers associated with the Warsaw University of Technology, has received PLN 16.5 million in funding from the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR) under its ‘Fast Track’ measure. On top of that, the company has already raised over PLN 1 million in a share crowdfunding campaign on the UK-based platform Seedrs. This money will go to support the Hyperloop technology in Poland.

Its beginnings date back to 2015. Over the years, Hyper Poland and the students on the Hyper Poland University Team have been taking home awards for their Hyperloop vehicles as well as valuable experience. The company has been developing their own technology inspired by Hyperloop for two years. Their proposal involves implementation of the solution in three stages, starting from the commercialization of a magnetic levitation (‘maglev’) rail which would be able to travel at a speed of 300 km/h (ca. 186 mph) on the existing railway lines. This will be possible with the designed track modifications.

Hyper Poland is the only company in the world to have developed a method for adapting the existing tracks to accommodate magnetic levitating vehicles. And even more than that; their solution is designed to enable standard trains and maglev trains to run interchangeably. This would be much cheaper than the originally proposed construction of the vacuum tube infrastructure from scratch. 

Hyper Poland intends to allocate the NCBR funds to research and development on the propulsion and suspension systems for all three proposed stages of the Hyperloop technology development. The money will be used to build test stations for linear propulsion and magnetic levitation. Moving forward, a full-scale prototype vehicle and an over 500-meter long track enabling the maglev vehicle to reach a speed of 300 km/h will be built at the site owned by the Polish Railway Research Institute in Żmigród.

The R&D project under the grant will continue until mid-2022. But the company wants to start levitation and propulsion testing still this year. Then, the levitation and motor parameters will be checked for consistency with the numerical models. Other plans involve electromagnetic compatibility testing to compare various algorithms of motor steering and stress tests on the motor which will analyze the stress response of tracks to a moving test model.

The Hyper Poland team includes a number of the Warsaw University of Technology graduates and students. We shared some of their stories on our blog, WUT Square.