Solar team Twente: Driven by Light, Guided by Vision

Solar Team Twente has been building solar cars since 2001. The 2025 edition consists of 17 students from various backgrounds from the University of Twente. All of us have completely put our studies on hold for a whole year to build a solar car and race it through the outback. We are extremely passionate and motivated to create a truly ground breaking and technologically advanced solar car to help us win the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge.

For many editions Solar Team Twente has partnered with Euro circuits for our PCB manufacturing. We as a team work tirelessly to create the world’s most efficient solar cars. To do this we need reliable components and the flexibility to make our ideas come to reality. While many of our circuits are complex and use small SMD components some of our ideas require flexibility to optimize for space and weight.

One of the most crucial components on a solar car is of course the solar panel. To convert the energy obtained by the solar panel and make sure the maximum amount of energy is obtained a panel box is used. This panel box contains several MPPTs or maximum power point trackers and other circuitry to combine all the power generated and some circuits for safety. This year Solar Team Twente has made a car with a 6m2 solar panel, as you can imagine this can generate a large amount of energy. This requires us to have electronics that can also handle this power. A big part of this is the busbar of the panel box. This combines all the power collected by the MPPTs and sends it to the high voltage wires which run throughout the car and are connected to the battery. To optimize the busbar a custom design was needed to save space and therefore weight. The custom solution allowed us to stack our MPPTs on top of the busbar, saving a lot of space. In addition to this with Eurocircuits we were able to use 6 layers of copper to reduce power losses.

For more information please visit the Solar Team twente website.