Campus Tirol Motorsport

Campus Tirol Motorsport Formula Student Team from Innsbruck

Campus Tirol Motorsport is a Formula Student Team made up of students from different Universities of Tyrol. Each year, we build an electric race car to compete in Events against teams from other Universities.

Our team is relatively small and young, compared to many other Formula Student Teams. Nevertheless, in the last two years, we have managed to build cars that passed all technical inspections at the Formula Student competitions. At the Formula Student Netherlands Event we finished 12th, and at the Formula Student Austria Event we finished 14th in the electric vehicles class.

Despite the small size of our Electronics team, we develop many systems ourselves from the ground up. We need to make sure they are rule compliant, fit our performance requirements and the mechanical size and weight constraints of a race car, which induces many self developed PCBs.

A good example of this are the PCBs of our high voltage accumulator, which include the accumulator management system master PCB based on an STM32, which communicates over isoSPI with ASIC cell monitoring chips in each segment of the accumulator. The main accumulator management system is part of a PCB stack that includes our precharge board and the IMD. This stack reduces the mechanical footprint. 

The PCBs with the LTC6811 ASICs to monitor cell voltage and temperatures as well as to balance the cells are designed to directly fit on to the busbars that connect the series’ groups of cells to minimize the number of wires and connectors. With that, we increased reliability and minimized the packing space required.

Our other self developed PCBs include our vehicle control unit, various PCBs to send sensor measurements over the car's CAN bus, the brake system plausibility device and tractive system active light which are required by the rules.

This year we are switching from cylindrical to pouch cells in the high voltage accumulator, so our cell monitoring boards need an entire redesign to fit the new mechanical requirements. This is where we would like to use Flexible PCBs to completely eliminate single wires and have a solution that is robust against mechanical vibrations.

Additionally, we are also starting to develop our own 600V 40kW motor driver based on Silicon Carbide MOSFET to have a more compact and efficient solution than the inverter we currently use from AMK.