Undeterred by its inability to find a battery powerful enough for its entry in the SpaceX Hyperloop competition, which is pushing the development of a high-speed, ground transportation system twice as fast as a bullet train, the TE Connectivity-backed rLoop team simply made its own.
“The battery is what limits the potential of what we can do,” said Brent Lessard, project manager for rLoop, according to Alison Burdo for the Philadelphia Business Journal.
The team consists of engineers and others from around the world who came together on the social media platform Reddit. Their rLoop group has entered Infira, a pod that is supposed to reduce time of travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco to 30 minutes.
Berwyn’s TE Connectivity, a manufacturer of connectors and sensors, has contributed a number of the parts for Infira. However, it is the team’s newly designed battery that will most likely draw the most interest from both the sponsor of the competition, Elon Musk, and fellow competitors.
“The battery probably has the largest concentration of TE sensors or connectors,” said Lessard, explaining that battery technology often lags behind other advancements.
Read more about the team in the Philadelphia Business Journal here, and check out previous VISTA Today coverage TE Connectivity here.
