Mainfranken Racing: From Ambition to Electric Excellence

Mainfranken Racing at Technical University of Applied Science Würzburg-Schweinfurt is a non-profit association‚ that was founded in September 2006.
Born out of the idea of some motor sports enthusiastic students.

After participating at Formula Student Germany in 2007 we finished with 14th place overall and 2nd runner up in the newcomer competition in Hockenheim.
These results pushed our ambition to build an even better car over the past fourteen years.

After the switch to EV 2018/2019 we are now presenting our first EV car with integrated Driverless components.

As you can imagine, an electric racing car like the one we build contains many electronic components that have to be adapted to the individual conditions in the vehicle. The PCB´s are therefore developed by us and manufactured by Eurocircuits.

We start by considering the necessary functions and then creating the circuit diagrams. After a review, the components for the circuit boards are selected. As soon as the components have been determined, the board can be laid out using our PCB design software.

This is the term used to describe the digital creation and placement of the subsequent PCB.

Due to the construction of our accumulator and the associated high-voltage supply, the PCBs in our vehicle are not only affected by low voltages, but also by high-voltage aspects. The exact placement of the components with a certain distance to each other and the design of the right parts is a challenge that we have to face in the design phase.

Examples of this are the AMS board or the PDU or Power Distribution Unit. The PDU, as you can see in the picture below, is also the result of our development process and is installed in our latest racing car.

As the name suggests, it is responsible for distributing the power and is to be integrated into the low-voltage area of the vehicle. We used a 4-layer circuit board for our PDU, which we received from Eurocircuits according to our wishes. It was then assembled by hand and is now ready for testing before it is used in the racing car.

The PCB´s of Eurocircuits always have the perfect quality we need for our High and Low Voltage areas in our race car. We are happy to have a partner by our side with such a great knowledge about the right manufacturing of the PCB`s.