ITU Electric Vehicle Team

In 2014, with the initiative of a few students, we embarked on a journey to work on the future of electric vehicle technologies, and we continued with the same enthusiasm and accumulated knowledge from the first day. Our goal is to develop highly efficient and safe driving technologies, and with the data from May 2023, our team has designed and/or produced around 95% of its own vehicle components and parts. We have been participating in Shell Eco-Marathon competition in Europe since 2016 and Efficiency Challenge competition since 2021 in Türkiye.

Today, our team has designed and/or produced all major and secondary systems such as battery design, battery management system, battery protection, battery charging, driver circuit and secondary electronic circuits, electric motor, electric motor-driven wheel, chassis, protective cage, upper shell, outer cladding, front suspension, steering box, door locking system, and all gear systems. What sets us apart is the strength of our innovative, extraordinary, and original designs. Additionally, our team has members and staff actively involved in non-technical areas such as bureaucratic processes, official correspondence, social media, website design, career planning, and education. We believe that these elements are indispensable for the progress of the team.

To accomplish all this, we have more than 10 departments at ITU, accommodating students not only with technical expertise but also allowing them to develop in their own professional fields or areas of interest. From the past to the present, along with the founding members who have graduated over time, we are carrying ITU Electric Vehicle Team into the future as a family. We progress in line with the team's mission and vision, representing our country and university in national and international competitions. Engaging in engineering battles, we aim to achieve notable successes in these competitions and graduating engineers with diverse knowledge.

The part of the team that designs PCBs is the electronics sub-team. Most of the electronic parts are explained as:

1.Vehicle Control Unit:

Main tasks of this PCB is to control the peripherals of the car such as; infotainment, wiper, lights, signals, buzzer, buttons, housing and communicating with telemetry system and make the end node of the CAN-BUS in car communication system. It has a STM32F103C8T6 microcontroller as a cpu, and TJ1051 CAN transceiver, LDO regulators for power and relays for other peripherals.

2.Telemetry System:

We use a RYLR896 LoRa module to communicate with ground stations. It works on 868 mHz channel per European standards.

3.Battery Management System:

The BMS is used for control of the battery cells' health, checking the voltages and storeing them at the equilibrium state.It has a two part system; one main(master) and one/multiple side(slave) PCBs. Main board uses a ATMEGA328P-AUR as a microcontroller, MCP215 and as TJA1052 CAN-BUS transceiver, and uses iso-SPI interface for communicating with slave boards with daisy chain linking system.

4.Isolation Monitoring System:

The insulation monitoring device is designed to measure insulation leakage between battery terminals and chassis. Insulation loss is detected by measuring the insulation resistance between electrical systems (chassis) isolated from ground voltage and battery terminals. Different measurement paths are created with the help of relays and as a result of the measurements made for different leakage resistances, the voltage drops on the resistance to be measured are examined. Taking these voltage values into account, the voltage is amplified using a suitable op-amp so that it can be read through the ADC of the STM32F103C8T6.

5.EV Inverter:

One of the biggest problems in Electric Vehicles is that although vehicles generally have a voltage level of 12V DC, the gate drivers perform opening and closing operations better at 15V and above. For this reason, it is important to design a large-scale Boost Converter that can convert 12V voltage level to 15V and above voltage level on the circuit to be designed. Moreover, since this project is for electric vehicles, it is vital that the parts to be noise and to protect our expensive and difficult-to-replace elements.

6.HEV Inverter:

We are also prepraring to produce a Hydrogen Fuelcell powered electric vehicle, we designed a discrete switch version of our inverter for competition. Due to reason mentioned above this circuit includes 3-phase inverter consisting of automotive standard products with 1200V 200A dicrete IKQ120N60TXKSA1 switch and also the ability to drive both via encoder and hall sensor and CAN communication interface and 12V-15V TI TPS61288 Boost Converter and Infinenon brand driver IC 2ED020I12-F2 as gate driver. The main purpose of using this IC to save the processor side from noise and to protect our expensive and difficult-to-replace elements.

The collaboration between universities and industries is the smallest example of collaboration, and the continuous support provided by you for the activities of university teams is very important and valuable. The successes we have achieved and the representation duties we have undertaken are thanks to the heartfelt support of all our collaborators. We eagerly await your collaboration and contributions for us to exceed our goals. Feeling your presence as we walk this path gives us hope and confidence. We look forward to our collaboration and your valuable contributions to help us surpass our goals.