Forze: Driven by Vision, Powered by Hydrogen

Blog 1 Eurocircuits & Forze

At Forze Hydrogen Racing, our mission is to promote hydrogen as a sustainable carrier of energy and educate ourselves as engineers of the future. We do this by designing, building and racing hydrogen race cars. Over the years, we have produced a lineup of 9 hydrogen powered cars. Now, we are working towards the next generation of our car: the Forze IX.

The Forze IX is another step in hydrogen powered racing cars. Where Forze VIII had one hydrogen system and rear wheel drive, Forze IX will have two hydrogen systems and 4-wheel-drive. This will result in some amazing specifications: Top speed of 300 km/h, torque vectoring and a boost power of 820 hp.

The goal of our team for this year is to participate in a race with the Forze IX. For this we need to integrate some major systems from our testbenches into the car. As easy as this might seem, it brings quite some challenges and unexpected problems arise all the time. The embedded system specific goal we have this year is to develop the second version of our embedded system. The goal here is to make it more stable and therefore reliable.

To educate the students at Forze as much as possible, everything is designed and produced in-house. This also means we chose to design and build our embedded system completely built scratch. It is a centralized system, with many nodes, each capable of controlling a sub system in the car. For this we design the PCBs ourselves and write the software for it. Combining the different aspects of PCB design is a very valuable and unique experience which allows our engineers to learn a lot from all the different challenges of such a project.

The nodes are called DIN’s in our car, it is a device with multiple PCBs stacked on top of each other. Each PCB has different functions. They can enable relays, readout sensor data in multiple input types, but also communicate using CAN. It is an extremely dense board, so the routing of this board was very complex. Redesigning it is therefore quite the challenge, the density of the board and the wide range of use cases make for difficult design requirements. This requires our engineers to critically look at the design that already exists and also thoroughly think about new implementations.

This is where Eurocircuits came to help. They were not only able to deliver to PCBs but also assemble them for us. This helped us a lot! Therefore our electro engineers could keep working on other parts of the embedded system. Eurociruits was able to deliver a huge amount of assembled PCB in an extremely short time. This allowed us to take the next step in the development of the Forze IX.

For more information please visit the Forze Hydrogen Racing website.