Formula Student Team Delft – DUT 23

Formula Student Team Delft building the DUT 23

For over 22 years, Formula Student Team Delft has been nurturing passionate engineers through the means of building a fast, well understood car and driving it to its full potential. More than 2 decades ago the team started off building combustion race cars. In 2011 the team switched from combustion to electric with the DUT11 and went on to win FSG for 3 years in a row.

Over the past few years, we are also developing the car to be able to drive autonomous and with our latest design, the DUT23 we hope to be able to drive both autonomously and manually driven to win FSG once more.  This arduous and enriching journey is fuelled each year by the team’s trusted sponsors, among whom, Eurocircuits has been a crucial support over the past years.

Eurocircuits helps the team produce various PCBs that govern the electrical system of the car. Each year, two versions of all the PCBs are produced for testing wherein the upgrades from the first versions are incorporated into the second version. After testing the second version, the final PCBs are produced to be used in the car. Thanks to Eurocircuits, the team can rigorously test every little detail in the PCB designs and ensure a robust electrical performance of the car during competitions.

Accumulator Management System

One of the PCBs that go into the car is the Accumulator Management System, or AMS in short. This PCB manages the high voltage battery pack of the car by continuously monitoring its temperature, voltage and current in real time, and making sure that these quantities are maintained within a certain threshold. This year, in order to ensure robust isolation in high voltage measurement, the team is using the sigma-delta modulating filter in the STM32 microcontroller, while the current measurement is being done through a hall effect sensor. This combination of voltage and current measurement eliminates the need of using external sensors, thereby saving weight and space, while ensuring optimal compliance with the competition rules.