Green Team Twente 2020

The Team

As you may already know, Green Team Twente is a student team from the university of Twente. In previous years we participated in the Shell Eco-marathon where we race to test who has built the most efficient hydrogen fuelled concept car.

Last year Green Team Twente became European and world champion at this race. Sadly, this year there will be no race because of the coronavirus, despite of this we are still working hard on improving our car.

This year the focus was put on making the systems more accessible, reliable and of course more efficient.

With these goals in mind, a large part of the electrical system as seen in our car has been revised, which is of course where Eurocircuits comes in. Eurocircuits has been producing the PCB’s which we design in our workshop for several years already and in all cases without any issues. This is why we are very proud to have Eurocircuits as a partner.

In the remainder of this blog, two of the PCB project’s that have been produced at Eurocircuits will be discussed. The fact that the first two of these PCB’s make up a large part of our powertrain emphasizes why we need the services of Eurocircuits.

Electronics in the Car

One of the boards we revised this year was the so-called Stack Controller PCB, which controls our fuel cell and all components driving it. Next to an updated current sensing circuit, the board features an updated 12V conversion circuit. This efficiently converts the fuel cell power to 12V power, which we can use to power other PCB’s in our car. The merit of this efficient conversion is that this reduces the amount of power drawn from our accessory battery. Besides the fact that this is advantageous in the Shell Eco-marathon, this is a noble quest, since the car now becomes more and more dependent on hydrogen to power the vehicle, instead of using “wall socket-power”. Finally, the positions of all connector headers have been optimized to fit neatly in our car, greatly reducing cable length.

Another nice project in which we used the services of Eurocircuits is the combination of two previously existing boards – the stack monitor and the cooling PCB – into one. The function of the stack monitor is to monitor the 50 fuel cell voltages and to measure the temperature of the fuel cell, the function of the latter PCB was to drive air fans which were responsible for cooling the fuel cell in case of overheating. The fact that these PCB’s are now combined into one makes the cooling system local on that board, so that in case our communication network in the car fails, the cooling system should still work. Furthermore, the signals in the voltage sensing circuits are now filtered and protected far better than in the old stack monitor, which allows for more accurate readings. This is very much needed in order to be able to optimize the fuel cell system.

Cooperation with Eurocircuits

From the story above it should be clear that with the help of Eurocircuits, we have been able to improve our electrical system in terms of reliability, efficiency and accessibility. This has opened up the way for the next installment of Green Team Twente to put down an awesome achievement at the Shell Eco-marathon in the summer of 2021.

With the services of Eurocircuits, our PCB designs could be converted into reality very quickly and error-free. We are therefore very happy to have the Eurocircuits logo on our hydrogen car during both this and the next year and we hope that this will continue for many years to come.

Let’s win some trophies together!

Olof Baltus,
Team Manager of Green Team Twente
LinkedIn: Olof Baltus
Auke Vleerstraat 3b | 7521 PE
Enschede, the Netherland

For more information please visit the Green Team Twente website.

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