Koelemay's Kosmos

Doug Koelemay

Promise into Profit

ODU’s wrestling match with maglev illustrates the difficulty of engineering scientific principle into a working product … and the necessity of doing so.

The latest news from the Old Dominion University experiment with an on-campus maglev train doesn’t read well at all. “Maglev Train Hits Bumps with Station Demolition” certainly is not the headline either the university or investors in Dominion Virginia Power and Lockheed Martin had in mind when teaming up with American Maglev Technology Inc. in December 1999. But in the low moments of any attempt to apply an innovative technology, even one that dates back almost a century as maglev does, comes the reminder that while scientists love surprises, engineers hate them.

The vision ODU and its private sector partners have been following in the last five years turns out to be almost as old as the United States. Back in 1780 Benjamin Franklin speculated on the science involved. ”It is impossible to imagine the height to which we may be carried in a thousand years,” Franklin wrote. “We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport.”

As American moved into the 20^th century, aeronautical pioneer Robert Goddard in 1909 imagined, “Trains would run in a vacuum and be held in suspension by the repulsion of opposing magnets on the cars and tube, respectively.” But it took a French-born New Yorker, Emile Bachelot, to refine a repulsion form of magnetic levitation, build a model and patent the idea of its use on a train in 1912.

Still, as ODU and Norfolk have discovered, it has taken decades of further refinement to make maglev trains, such as those developed in Germany (the newest version of which is running in Beijing) and Japan, workable. Keys to further progress were inventions in 1966 by two Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists, James Powell and Gordon Danby, using high current density superconducting magnets. The magnets were powerful enough to support a rapidly moving vehicle several inches above a guideway of conducting sheets or coils. (Interestingly, similar advances in magnet technologies and power turned an observation technique engineered for microbiology in the 1930s into MRIs – magnetic resonance imaging – for a whole person.)

About 15 years ago through a National Maglev Initiative, the United States decided to reenter the maglev research and development sweepstakes by encouraging entrepreneurs to develop vehicles and systems. One of the entrepreneurs encouraged was Tony Morris, head of American Maglev Technology Inc., now ODU’s campus partner. Morris’s AMT ran out of money in the late 1990s in Edgewater, Fla., before he could demonstrate how his maglev vehicle could navigate an 800-foot test track. Still, the idea seemed compelling enough five years ago that Dominion Virginia Power and Lockheed Martin invested $7 million and the Virginia General Assembly approved a $7 million loan and the federal government supplied $2 million to match AMT’s only $16 million pledge.

Powerful electric magnets levitate, propel, guide and stop maglev vehicles, yielding benefits over more conventional steel-wheeled trains that mesmerize governments, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs. At its best, maglev features light weight vehicles, quick acceleration and braking, the ability to climb steep grades and operate automatically (no driver needed). The vehicles can operate alone, in tandem or in trains of varying lengths (which dynamically can match capacity to demand). Operations are safe, quiet and clean.

The final report of the National Maglev Initiative was optimistic in its conclusions that American industry could develop an advanced maglev system and that such a system had the potential to produce revenues that would exceed life cycle costs. What NMI envisioned, however, was a high-speed, perhaps 300 mile-per-hour complement to air and passenger car travel in the most heavily traveled corridors, such as Washington-New York-Boston and San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco. AMT’s Morris sold the ODU-based development project as the first step toward a commercially viable high-speed link between Hampton Roads and Washington (by 2007), which would repay the loan from the Commonwealth.

The high initial investments required by maglev, the NMI report noted, would require substantial public assistance -- as have ports, canals, rail, highways and airports in their time – but offered great potential to develop new technologies, industries and jobs. Unfortunately, none of these claims, save substantial public assistance, have come true at the ODU site. Engineers continue to work on basic computer controls and sensors to steady the maglev vehicle at speeds higher than the four miles per hour tested in 2002. Maglev clearly is not the way anyone will visit the Jamestown 400^th anniversary celebrations.

Still, the technology advances and with it, the imagination of how it might be used. After working with NASA as a part of the National Maglev Initiative, for example, Virginia Tech pioneered the concept of combining maglev technology with a platform to carry one automobile or freight truck at a time, a personal electric rapid transit system (PERTS). PERTS would allow a passenger car to drive onto a maglev platform, leave immediately, be whisked along an elevated guideway to a destination, then drive off. Because only one vehicle at a time is transported, PERTS could offer instant service (no wait for a train to load) and a smaller, less expensive guideway (to support only one vehicle at a time, not a whole train). And the guideway and vehicles could be manufactured in Virginia.

Maglev clearly can work, as the quick ride from Beijing’s Airport into the Chinese capital may prove to Virginia’s Governor and his trade mission visiting China this week. But the technology is not working now in Virginia and the $2 million in federal dollars that finally has arrived for the project are the only funds left from the 1999 investment. Does that mean it is a waste of taxpayer money or of industry attention or of professor and graduate student time? Not by a long-shot. Turning a scientifically interesting idea into a commercially viable one is a difficult process, but it is one the future demands. As a complex system, maglev transportation still needs work, but Virginia should keep building a share of this future.

-- June 7, 2004