Former Plaquemine resident serves on LSU's Hyperloop team

LSU’S Hyperloop team has spent the past year working on a new transportation prototype, a pod which could float inside a tube and travel at the speeds of 500 to 600 miles per hour.  Hyperloop is a concept for a new high-speed transportation system created by SpaceX founder Elon Musk.  

Former Plaquemine resident Brian Blanchard, a sophomore in Electrical Engineering at LSU, serves as the head of the sensors division and continues to provide his knowledge of instrumentation and general electrical engineering to the innovative project.

The team’s dream is to build a Hyperloop that would run from Baton Rouge to New Orleans reducing the commute to 20 minutes each way.  The team is currently on the road to test it out on SpaceX’s Hyperloop test track in Hawthorne, Ca.  They are only one of 30 team picked from more than 1,000 applicants worldwide to test their prototype in SpaceX’s Hyperloop competition.

The team consists of 32 students from physics, finance and engineering majors.  LSU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor Aly-Mousaad Aly is the team’s faculty adviser.  The team has spent the past year building the pod with support from Louisiana businesses and the university.

“It’s something more than just building some backyard science project,” said Connor Joslin, the team’s lead engineer.  “It’s something we are building for Louisiana, to boost our education and to help the community.”

Joslin explained how their prototype is one of the largest and most realistic pods in the competition.  The LSU team’s technology is more than theoretical and has the potential to be built to fullscale.

This competition will bring together the best engineering teams to test innovative prototypes of the Hyperloop pod on its mile-long track from Jan. 27-29.