Formula Student Racecar from DART – Technical University Darmstadt

Project

DART – “Darmstadt Racing Team” is a team of about 40 students who all have the same goal. Within one year, an electrically powered racing car of the Formula Student class, driving both autonomously and with a driver, is to be newly developed and built.

This is used to compete against other universities and colleges all over the world in various competitions, not only in technical terms, but also in aspects such as efficiency, innovation, and business viability.

History

Since 2006, racing cars have already been manufactured in our workshop on the TU campus. Until 2011 still with combustion engine, then the switch to an electric drivetrain. Since 2017, an autonomously driving race car has also been built in parallel, and since 2020, both systems have been combined in one race car.

Season 2021

This requires not only an extraordinary discipline, but also precise planning, because such a complex project in a limited time to implement, especially students who have not yet gained work experience. With this, the potential to learning grow, not only in technical terms, but also what it means to work together with a team on a large project.

In the last season of Formula Student, 2021, which was characterized by COVID-19 often quite different than usual, we had set ourselves various goals. Since a race car is composed of different components, there are different departments, such as aerodynamics, chassis or even ET / IT, which deals with the electronics of the vehicle and the associated software.

For many students it is the first time that you meet with a circuit board on a developer basis. All boards of our electrical system are developed and tested by ourselves.

Eurocircuits supports Team DART and manufactures some of these boards, which allows us to gain initial experience with electrical requirements and components during our education. One example of this is our sensornode, which reads out all the sensors in the rear of the race car, interprets them and communicates them to the other circuit boards in the vehicle.

Next Season

The new DART Team started the 2022 season back in August, with many new members pursuing the task of expanding the work of their predecessors and building on last season’s experience to deliver more performance and even more innovation.