Introduction

The Agoria Solar Team is a team of nineteen students who share the passion and motivation to have built the eighth Belgian solar car that competed in -and won- the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge in October, 2019.

As we started our adventure together, we had the opportunity to build on the work and experience of our many predecessors.

Their knowledge, mixed with the newest technologies implemented in a reliable way, was an important factor in winning the Bridgestone Solar Challenge.

The BWSC is a solar race that spans 3021km throughout the Australian outback.

The cars are allowed to drive between 8am and 17pm with 9 obligated control stops. The solar cars start with a fully charged battery pack and along the way, they can only use the car’s solar panels as incoming power source.

Aside from the race, the Agoria Solar Team aims to create awareness for the good alternatives for fossil fuels.

An essential part is to motivate young people to educate themselves in a field that can contribute to the knowledge-based economy of tomorrow by stimulating them with innovation and entrepreneurship.

Various events are organised by the Agoria Solar Team to achieve this goal. Examples include the Solar Olympics (a competition for secondary schools), stunts in the media, networking-events…

Partnership with Eurocircuits

It is an absolutely massive undertaking to design, produce and test a solar car in the short period of only 15 months, requiring large intellectual and financial capital.

Hence, our victory in Australia would have been unthinkable without our partners.

We are very grateful to have a well-established partnership with Eurocircuits, supplying us the novel printed circuit boards that our engineers designed to perform the various electronics tasks in the car.

Due to several shortcomings of commercial Battery Management Systems, our electrical department chose to design our own, custom BMS.

All electrical components were thoroughly tested to make sure they can withstand the harsh race throughout the Australian outback.

In order to design the BMS and still leave sufficient time for programming and testing, we had to set early deadlines for its hardware prototypes.

It was a massive help that we could always count on Eurocircuits’ fast and reliable production capabilities, as well as their online PCB Visualizer that helped quickly determining PCB errors.

This enabled us to develop a custom Battery Management System in time that was used during 2019’s Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, reliably providing us correct State-of-Charge (battery %) estimations and cell measurements, which were important factors to determine the optimal race strategy and by extent contribute to our world title.

Thank you Eurocircuits