320 Ë 8 New progress of HTS Maglev vehicle
(a)(b)Fig. 8.61:Photos of the ETT HTS Maglev vehicle system. (a) Panorama, (b) “Super-Maglev” running
in the evacuation tube.
Maglev train was held at SWJTU in China. Jia-Su Wang presented an ETT HTS Maglev
train proposal with a proposed speed of more than 600 km/h [60]. Then in early 2005,
design consideration of the super-high-speed HTS Maglev vehicle system in a low-
pressure tube (LPT) or ETT was proposed based on the 5-year continuous studies on
the first HTS Maglev vehicle [61] (see Sections 6.17, 6.19, 6.20, and Fig. 4.17). Figu-
re 4.17 presents the preliminary structure design of the LPT/ETT HTS Maglev vehicle
system.
Up to now, neither a real-scale nor an experimental HTS Maglev vehicle system
has been built to operate in an ETT or LPT. In May 2014, an evacuated tube was
successfully assembled to cover the HTS Maglev ring line “Super-Maglev”, which
can now be considered to be a real ETT HTS Maglev vehicle system. As the new
transportation concept, “Super-Maglev”, as shown in Fig. 8.61, has successfully run
in the evacuated tube since May 2013. A speed of 40 km/h was obtained under the low
air pressure of near 0.1 atm, which is only 10 km/h below the maximum design speed
of 50 km/h without passengers.
The significance of the “Super-Maglev” is that it will be the first ETT HTS Maglev
prototype to realize this new transportation concept for future ETT. At this moment,