Free-Fall Spinning-Planet Tunnel Transportation Network

Name: Yuchen Gan
Major: Physics
Advisors: Dr. John Lindner, Dr. Niklas Manz
Transportation is a very general and important thing. We have airplanes and trains for long distance traveling now. It would be really interesting to have a new transportation tool which is much faster than these transportation tools. Free-fall tunnel transportation network is such a tool. If Earth is not rotating, it takes only 42 minutes for any object to travel from one side of Earth to the other side in an evacuated tunnel powered by gravity alone. We do not need to do anything except to put the object or yourself at the entrance of the tunnel. This research studies this new transportation system in a spinning Earth in detail. It shows that curved periodic free-fall tunnels can connect multiple points on the surface of a planet at any latitude. Theory and computation will help to elucidate the tunnel system in both inertial reference frame and rotating reference frame.