Formula Electric Belgium in 2022-2023

With more than twelve years of experience, Formula Electric Belgium is the oldest Formula Student team in Belgium. We have managed to thrive and stay competitive over all those years thanks to our partners. Eurocircuits is one of our partners that we very much cherish deeply: they have become a huge part of our DNA, and for a very long time now they have been a force we could rely on to provide us with only the highest quality of PCBs. With this post we would first like to thank Eurocircuits for their continuous support over all these years – thank you Eurocircuits! – and then we would like to present the team of this year and look forward on what the academic year 2022-2023 holds for us.

What does our team look like this year? This year, the team has grown quite a bit. Next to having 20 full-time dedicated engineering students, we also proudly boast having 20 students working on our project part-time, and 12 students doing their master’s thesis with us. In total we are thus a group of 52 motivated students this year. Out of those 52 students, the electronics department – the department that collaborates most closely with Eurocircuits – consists of 4 full-time member and 4 part-time members. If you wish to get to know our team of this year better, please check out this video.

Our primary objective for the car’s electronics this year is to develop a new ECU that is more compact yet still powerful. Our previous ECU was reliable but had a bulky design. To optimize space utilization in the vehicle even more, we plan to integrate the ECU and dashboard. We will provide more detailed information about this new ECU in an upcoming blog post.

In addition to this major task of developing a new ECU, several other updates and changes will also be made. These include a new push-to-talk system, an improved battery system, a redesigned cable loom development process, a new STEM-package, and more. One specific change for the next car is the implementation of a semi-active suspension (SAS) system, which replaces the passive suspension system used last year. This system requires electronics for proper functioning. The image below shows the PCB that will control this semi-active suspension system.

In summary, our team is bigger than ever and we are using this as an advantage to make updates to our car that would otherwise be more difficult to realise. Please look forward to our next blog post!