From SpaceX Hyperloop Winner to Swisspod Technologies Co-Founder | Denis Tudor Interview

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1:08Hi, welcome in real life. I'm Paul Turnbull, and we're doing a podcast today. We've got Dennis Tudor with us who is the co-founder of SwissPod Technologies, kind of a company making hyperloop, a real thing. And we've recently seen, in November, a big reveal. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that and the technology behind it. So Dennis, you wanna give us a little quick introduction? Yeah, thank you so much for this and thank you so much for having me. I'm Danny Studor, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Suisport, we develop hybrid technologies. Personally, we co-founded a company back into the 19, after winning a couple of times the SpaceX HyproPod competition. So we've been evolving in the Elon's challenge

2:09that was amazing, I would say. I was part of two different teams that I co-founded, one in California and one in Switzerland. And we won the innovation award. Actually, that was probably the greatest award that we got from SpaceX. And after that, I did also PhD in hyperloop. So in hybrid sciences, I kind of linked the propulsion systems to the vacuuming and to all the depressurization of the tube. And since 2019, I've been leading Suisport. So yeah, it's very cool. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate to see. According to Indeed Data, sponsor jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsor job credit at indeed.com slash podcast,

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4:14to have a quick look at. So in November, you guys did a reveal of some technology demonstrator out in Colorado, I think it was. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, it was in Pueblo, Colorado. We had the IRIS one that's been tested in front of 150 people. It was a pretty exciting event. We had our first full-scale module running. So this is our first full-scale module. It's called IRIS one. And actually it's driven by a single-sided linear induction motor, which is powered up by a battery pack, which is on board of the vehicle. That's very important. So I love these tech discussions. I'm a tech guy. So I'll get deeper into that conversation later. But yeah, IRIS one was tested. We reached almost 70 miles an hour on the stretch of 1700 feet

5:15of track, which represents today just one third of the full track. So we want to do kind of a mile of track, which is going to be a closed loop system in the end. And it was pretty exciting, especially that the night before we had some sparkles in the battery pack. We have some powerful battery packs on board. It's the have a discharge rate of 50 C. And it's kind of like we wanted to push it crazy. And we got those sparkles was a bit tough. But we had to wear the whole night after. So we kind of made it November 21 for the event. So such a familiar story. Even for a very tried and true technology, when it comes to demonstrations and tests,

6:17and this is my background of actually getting hardware to run at the moment, it's a little bit like the Olympics where you may have done this 1,000 times, you've done this giant slum. But you have to actually do it at the moment on that day. And that's not always easy. It felt to be like space six competitions. So I'm not sure if you are aware of how that happens or how that happened. You basically have a week of tests. And then Elon was coming like on a Sunday. And then you got to show it up. You got to make it work on Sunday, basically. So it was pretty tough, but it was a great reward after. It was amazing. Actually, they're not going to be an amazing event. So one of the big infrastructure issues that you have when you try to do something like this is the typical approach would involve electrifying the track.

7:22And so you have a track that has high voltage in it and all the things that can go wrong with stretching miles of high voltage track out there. And one of the great things about SwissPod is the tried and true kind of technology. And it's all in the propulsion system on the vehicle. And so you can have a passive track. And so you can tell us about how you managed to do that. How can you do this kind of electric propulsion without having an electrified track? That's actually, yeah. That's, I mean, it's not easy at all. It's kind of super complicated, our approach. We had to play, I mean, in all these high-speed rail infrastructures or maglev systems, as you mentioned, you've got to have either electromagnets

8:24or magnets along the track. Or you've got to have this grid where you connect the train through a catenary you extract kind of infinite power from the grid. But that's kind of like an order of magnitude more expensive than using passive tracks. But there has been a reason why people used to do that. I think technologies were not that evolved. And there haven't been so many solutions that can actually feel this, let's say, trust versus speed profile. I think that's kind of the key for what we're doing. So using kind of like a technology all embedded into the vehicle itself, it creates a lot of engineering work. And we have a lot of challenges on the vehicle itself. And probably the most important challenge we overcame with these technologies

9:27to get rid of the end effect of the machine. So we currently use a single-sided linear induction motor as a propulsion system. It's kind of underneath the vehicle. So you cannot see it, but it's underneath the vehicle. And there are two reasons to use that. First of all, is the cost of the infrastructure and the second is the alignment of the track. So most of the transportation systems today they're kind of massively subsidized by governments, which means that we have taxpayers, we got to pay for that. However, we want to create a sort of an abundance, financial abundance out of this technology by just creating a business case out of this transportation system and not only kind of a social service for the taxpayers and having the taxpayers paying for it. And the challenge actually was to find a design of a machine

10:29which doesn't really have, kind of doesn't exponentially go lower in terms of thrust versus speed profile. Because any sort of machine that you attach on the vehicle is going to face that challenge that you have after 100 miles an hour, you have like a significant drop in terms of the thrust, of the traction force of the vehicle. That means that you cannot accelerate more than maybe 150 miles an hour, which is such a machine. So we found a way to control everything from the converter in such a way that we linearized this thrust versus speed profile. And that's kind of like, that's been the most difficult part of it. And that means that the end effect is kind of canceled. And that speeds of maybe 300 miles an hour, 400 miles an hour were capable to have an increase of 7x in terms of thrust versus speed profile.

11:31And further on, that enables basically that the vehicle can be powered up by a battery pack that is connected further to a converter, which is driving for the single-cellular induction motor. That means that our capsule should be actually self-driven and should be fully autonomous. And that means basically that we created in the end, without even realizing, we created kind of a robot that can properly itself very fast at speeds of, probably like, seven, eight, seven hundred miles an hour. Let's kind of assume under the sonic barrier. I think that's a kind of reasonable statement to mention. Without having a huge investment in the infrastructure, and that's happening because we managed to control very well the power electronics. And having a reaction plate of higher speeds out, made out of higher resistivity, we kind of get rid of this end effect

12:32that all these kind of machines on the vehicles they face. So I think that's really great for the future. I think it's not only the cost of the infrastructure that is high using kind of electrification on the track, but it's also the reliability. Imagine that you have 1,000 miles of track, and then you have like a few magnets broken along the track. You gotta kind of stop the track, pressurize back, consume energy, and then basically you gotta stop the whole lane. So you cannot really run anymore. As long as the magnets are not yet fixed. In our case, in our case, which we can just remove the capsule. Yes, because if there's any issues that with the propulsion system, it's all contained in the pod, the Swiss pod, and you can just put in a new one, or swap it in and get it. So like what we do today with a locomotive,

13:34you get another locomotive out of a train and get it going. Yes, you did mention one of the core issues at high speed, real today phase. If you're using a traditional electric motor, turning a wheel, then as it goes faster and faster, the power levels go up, and the ability of the motor to deliver the power goes down. So a typical induction motor has a power curve that drops off as it goes up to higher and higher speed. But your use of the linear induction motor allows you to get around that, and so the capability of the motor isn't dropping. I mean, you're not defying the conservation of energies as it goes faster and faster, and you want to deliver thrust, you still have to deliver the power. One of the things I really love about this technology

14:36is that you're not making any claims of breaking physical laws, and you're using some real tried and true technology. At its core, it's induction motor technology that Tesla himself would be comfortable with. He would see it immediately, recognize that. And that, so there's not a feasibility hurdle that you have to go over. It's more engineering and economic that you are addressing. And engineering and economic concerns that you're addressing. And those are something you can have an open issues list and work it down. You know, same kind of good old-fashioned engineering that gets projects on the road or in this case, on the rails, or floating above the rails.

15:36Yeah, there is another statement we kind of go through. So Iris one was kind of great tested well. Iris 2 is going to have a big surprise. We may put a passenger in it. And Iris 3 is going to be the one that, you know, I think is going to achieve a huge performance. We envision for Iris 3 to basically have a single device for levitation and propulsion and stability, but it should be very well controlled. I think a linear induction motor, it's been something, I mean, I assume that it's been there for a while. But I think the whole kind of old systems behind the linear induction motor are kind of more important. For instance, the converter and the way you control and all the control you do in the converter, I think it's great. And we envision that Iris 3 is going to have... Iris 2 is going to have like a device for levitation and amount for propulsion.

16:37And Iris 3 is going to have everything embedded in a single device. So we envision that we can build one single device that can offer trust, levitation and stability at high speed. I mean, that's a big challenge, but we're very positive about that. And... That is what you have in your patent. So... Oh, you take it, yeah. I did have a look at the patent. Yes. Is that... Oh, yeah, awesome. Awesome. So, yeah, you guys have a patented technology for doing exactly that. In one device, the linear propulsion plus stable levitation. Yeah, yeah, it's... And now the claims have been allowed. So we'll get the patent like accepted this pretty soon. Very excited. It's a new technology. And I think, you know, I think the... I mean, we're running optimization problem basically.

17:40So I think the company or the technology that is going to require the least amount of... The least amount of track into the tube and without any sort of complicated elements or electrification in the track, I think that's going to kind of win. And, you know, seeing Falcon 9 lending on three different legs, right? I think made us think that we should actually obtain levitation, stability, and trust through a single device and using a single reaction plate for that. And let's say, at this moment in time, we cannot really see how we can get rid of the guideway, like the two guideway systems for... In case something happens, you've got to have a mechanical lending, right? On sort of wheels. But if we figure that out,

18:41we can actually use a single kind of a monorail for that. And that would be awesome. But at this moment in time, I don't think it's going to be safe. But we also shouldn't really go more than three rails, which means two guideways and one reaction plate. If a Falcon 9 can get stability on three different legs, you can actually get stability for this on three different passive rails. No one goes to hangs for a spreadsheet. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So, Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. They'll be able to see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, line out the door. Hank makes the pizza, co-pilot, handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com slash work. Go further with the American Express Business Gold Card. Earn three times membership rewards points on flights

19:44and prepaid hotels when you book through MXTravel.com. Whether your destination is a business conference or a client meeting, your purchases will help you earn more points for future trips. Experience more on your travels with MX Business Gold. Terms apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash gold. MX Business Gold Card, built for business by American Express. So I am curious about the prototype you have in the background. So is there anything that you can show us on that prototype? If I was there, I'd be crawling all over it. Yeah, definitely, sure. We actually released this to the public. I list one. It's actually using only propulsion. It has only the linear induction motor. We have stability through wheels. We don't make the levitation yet. The levitation is going to come for 80s too. So it's actually under design and some parts,

20:45some of the parts are already under manufacturing. You can see here, like with yellow, they're the battery packs. So it's the power to master ratio of our vehicle, for instance, it's kind of 10 times larger than Tesla Model Y. So we embedded a lot of power inside of the kind of very low amount of mass. I think the mass of this vehicle, it's around 600 pounds. I think it's, and the amount of power we have, it's quarter of a megawatt through at the maximum rate. So it's kind of like, yeah, that's quite a bit. Yeah. So you can get some pretty good acceleration out of that. Yeah, yeah. And we haven't had yet enough track. We have like 1700 feet of track. But we're committing now to extend the track

21:46as we kind of funder is more. And I mean, I'm happy to make you a tour, if you want, with a camera. Yeah, if you can do that. Sure. I don't want to put you on the spot with that. Oh, it's pretty cool. I think most of our viewers are like to just get technologically, get a view of things. And there's nothing like seeing it with your eyes to make things a little clearer. It's actually can see here underneath the single-sided linear induction motor and the coils, which were actually manufactured by us. And you can see the gap with the reaction plate here here. So I'm going to try to describe, as in a normal induction, typical induction motor, this would be in a circle. And the rotor, which is made of just nothing but steel and aluminum, no exotic materials. And the rotor would be round.

22:48But in this case, we've unwrapped it. And so we have the rotor as the track. So it's steel and aluminum in a track. And then above it is the windings, which are essentially like a, again, steel and copper, no exotic materials. But steel and copper are arranged in a kind of toothed comb type of arrangement that is filled with the slots in the comb are filled with copper. And usually, if you look at all the magnet systems in Asia, they have the, I mean, let's put it this way, the coils in the track, which makes the track to be very expensive, right? But we put the coils on the vehicle, which makes the infrastructure to be cheap and to be kind of affordable, right? So just trying to explain a bit that. It's absolutely key. All right, trying to make, because you know, you can try to lay miles and miles a track.

23:50And making that track affordable is what makes the whole system affordable. Yeah. And then we have here, there's a kind of a South Korean company. And they have like high discharge battery packs. So the battery pack, you can see it right here. Those are the cells. We have like, we have a hundred series and three parallel. So we have 300 cells of, of, of, of, we have 300 cells. And the technology, it's a lithium polymer. So it's with NMC. And they can deliver like max peak of discharge rate. I think it's max for a couple of seconds, 75 C. And then we have like kind of max nominal discharge of 50 C, which is, which is quite a lot. However, much better discharge than a typical car battery, which, you know, we try to

24:55keep car batteries in the single digits, see discharge, you know, area, unless it's a special, you know, purpose built power battery. However, the energy density is quite low. It's like 140 watt hour per kilogram, which makes it half of what Tesla has nowadays. I think Tesla is somewhere to, somewhere like 270 watt hour per kilogram, something like that, right? Yeah. And that's the usual trade off, right? For, yeah. To get the power, you got to go with a little bit lower energy density, because you just need room for all that copper to deliver the power. However, if you think about Hyperloop, you know, I think Hyperloop is a power intensive application, rather than energy intensive application. Once you reach the cruising speed, it's supposed that due to the lack of atmosphere inside of the tube, you're going to kind of run smoothly. I mean, however, I mean, you have also a lot of power consumption at that moment in time,

26:00but still you have a peak of power, you need to accelerate the vehicle kind of like 5, 6, 100 miles an hour, and then you coast there. But once you stop the acceleration, so the speed becomes constant, then your power consumption should drop probably like 10 times than that. That makes the integral of the power profile to be quite flattened, which means that the battery pack should actually be built based on your maximum power needs, not really based on the energy density. So the game, the optimization is not mandatory to increase autonomy, but rather to provide a speed, the necessary speed for your application. And that somehow makes it power intensive rather than energy intensive, which means that the design of the battery pack should actually look different, right? Because we cannot have a great battery pack for everything.

27:01We've got to find the trade-off between the charging rate, discharge rate, energy density. So we didn't really achieve yet as human beings, like a battery cell that can actually fulfill all these conditions, like in terms of energy density and discharge rates yet. But I think they've been evolving. I've seen some cells now getting to 300 watt-hour per kilogram close to 10C discharge. So I think that's pretty exciting to see. Yeah. And one of the things you need now, that power for, not just accelerating a train, but also decelerating it. So you do regen braking to bring it to a stop. So you need to be able to convert all that kinetic energy back into. You got to charge it back, yeah, to bring the thing to a stop safely. Unfortunately, this cell has only one seed charging rate, which makes it almost useless for, yeah, it's kind of low.

28:03I'm early prototype, and that's likely to change with the technology that's coming out now. Yeah, I think for a second version, we're going to go in a different battery pack. We're going to release the new battery pack, probably within the next six months. It's going to be more exciting than this one. But this one had a lot of power in a very low amount of mass. So it's kind of you, you have like 140 grams of cell, and then you discharge 50C, which is huge, and it served our purpose for this one. But yeah. Okay. So there's a limited amount we can see from without tearing it apart, so I don't want to mess with your prototype, of course. I can ask somebody to come to dismantle it. Yeah, we would love to do that. Okay. But I don't want to use up all the time with the tour of the prototype.

29:06I want to talk a little bit about the plans, as you said, for the next step. So there's been a demonstration of this early prototype on the track, and the work out in part below to extend the track is continuing. And then the next step is going to be this next prototype. Can you do it? I'll give us a little description of what that likely is going to look like. So Iris2 is going to use two rails for propulsion levitation stability. And we actually, yeah, okay, I'm going to release it here. So we'll actually have initially, we'll put initial like an Optimus robot inside just to kind of like teach the robot how to drive. I mean, everything is actually autonomous, but we'll have the Optimus like giving orders to the vehicle, like to levitate and to go for a mission of, you know, like a certain distance

30:11and kind of having like a software stocking between themselves. And I think that's going to be a great, a great step for us to show to the word, where this technology can bring us. In terms of speed, we kind of estimate to reach Iris2, we're looking for speeds of 130 miles an hour, doubling up the speed we achieved with Iris1, with, let's say, 25 hundred feet of track available. So half of the track, half a mile completion of the track. And we're going to use the two guide ways that you can see on the sides for levitation purposes. So we're going to have levitation on the sides and then we're going to use the same type of propulsion system for even like the trust, the maximum trust we're going to have for AS2 is going to have five X more trust actually. So we're going to even go like even crazier is going to the size of the linear motor is

31:15going to double up and we're going to go fully contactless. So we're not going to touch any sort of like rail so no noise, no friction, like nothing like that. However, that's not yet like a single device for everything as mentioned before, right? So we kind of need to reach Iris2 in order to get to Iris3, which is going to have everything embedded into a single device. And if everything goes well with the optimal robot inside and we have like successful test, like kind of like consecutive tests, which are successful, we may also put a human being inside to for the day for starting to test like human beings. But that's not yet that would be something exciting, probably when our CTO is going to listen to this, he's going to get a bit nuts.

32:16But we'll see how the test go and then we actually may put a passenger in. That sounds really exciting. So I'm looking forward to the updates and hopefully we'll get a chance of Monroe Live to cover that in person when that starts to happen. Switching gears just a little bit to you more personally Dennis. One of the things that you've had sort of the dream job here and some of our viewers might wonder, how do you get, do you have any advice for someone to get a job in tech like this, how do you break into this type of field to get a chance to work on exciting technology like this? Well I can actually give a feedback from the other side, right, when we hire any person

33:16in Switzerland, I'm actually interviewing the person, I'm participating to all these interviews. And I think we should, we're always looking to hire more great talent, which they're excited about the future, obviously knowledge is important, but I think excitement about the future, excitement of working on new technologies is something, it's a big plus. So I think, I mean, CVs for me are not important at all. I always like when we hire somebody, it's that gut feeling that tells you, well that's kind of the right person for doing this job or not. And you know, like we had a couple of interviews and the CVs were amazing, I mean, if you look at the CVs were amazing, but it didn't really match with us a week, we work like seven days a week, we work, I mean, before the event, we, well, it was kind of crazy, crazy days

34:22and we're in a sort of a mission. So I would actually tell to young people that it would be cool to engage into a mission and engage into something like, to kind of like change the word for the future and I think that's very important. I also see a lot of people that they change the job every year. I've been doing this for 11 years, Hypero for 11 years, like winning the space competition and then doing the PhD and then doing the company. So and I'm still excited about what I'm doing. And I think people should be more excited about what they're doing and not really looking for kind of 5% salary increase from one job to the other. But I think that shouldn't really happen and I love solid people, consistent people on what they're doing and I think that's very important for the future of the human beings. And yeah, I think especially at the young age, you shouldn't really look like so much

35:25of the reword, but more in terms of financials, but more about the excitement you have about what you do. And I think that's something I've been doing for 11 years and I'm super excited about what Switzerland does nowadays. Yeah, I think that that's, I can't completely concur with that. That follow that excitement, the money does follow and you just trust that when you're working on the thing that you feel called to do, then the money will eventually follow that's that's been the pattern. My first job was when I was 15 and I was a Bellboy in a hotel, like getting languages for people. So and I'm very thankful about what I'm doing today is very exciting. Well, I want to thank you for taking time out to show us this awesome technology and such a great fit for the kinds of things that we love to talk about here and get a chance

36:28to see firsthand. I appreciate the tour and the details of the of the technology that you're able to show us and the prototype that you have here on site. And so I'm looking forward to a chance to see the next version when it gets operational as well. We'd love to welcome you in pueblo. Yeah, that sounds like fun. So again, thanks again, Dennis, go find her of a Swiss pod technologies and we appreciate it. See you next time. Thank you so much. And thanks a lot for to all the viewers at Monroe Live and we really appreciate your tuning and see this kinds of stuff and look forward to next time.