The University of Auckland Formula SAE Team

Formula SAE-A is the Australasian branch of the global Formula SAE competition organized by SAE international with the aim of exposing engineering students to practical engineering design and problem solving. The competition attracts over 600 different universities participating worldwide at over 13 different locations.

Picture from Formula SAE-Australisia

The competition itself is split into two parts. The first being the static events, where students must justify their design and create a business plan to sell their vehicle. The second portion of the event is the dynamic events, where teams compete against each other in the performance of their vehicles in a variety of categories such as acceleration, efficiency and endurance.

Community Introduction with related Community activity photos:

The University of Auckland Formula SAE Team consists of approximately 50 students who manage, design, build and test an autocross vehicle every year as an entirely extracurricular activity - not contributing to our degree or papers in any way. We do this out of our love for the project and our passion to better ourselves for our future careers. We believe the project allows for actual design and manufacture experience, if on a small scale, and that seeing a part through to completion from initial concept to functional vehicle is a fundamental educational tool.

Since its inception in 2004, our team has built 12 cars to compete yearly at Formula SAE-A and occasionally at Formula Student Germany. This year, we are building our second fully electric vehicle to compete at Formula SAE-A in December 2017.

The University of Auckland Formula SAE Team at FSAE-A in 2016

The University of Auckland Formula SAE Team electrical subgroup is responsible for the design and manufacture all of the electrical circuits which go into our autocross vehicle. With the switch to a fully electric vehicle requiring a lot more circuits for a variety of purposes compared to our previous combustion efforts. As such, the team has been moving onto the design of custom PCBs in order to create a maintainable and reliable electrical system for the vehicle.

There are a few projects which we are looking to implement. One of the main ones is the new, custom in house battery design for the M017, our 2017 vehicle. This project consists of a dual PCB Stack, where the bottom PCB serves as a wiring harness while the top implements our fully in house BMS Design.

The 2017 battery design will be a completely in-house design, consisting of 240 Lithium Polymer cells in a 120S2P configuration.

In addition to this, our subgroup is also in charge of producing a variety of projects such as building a wiring loom for the vehicle along with the design/manufacture of a variety of circuits for the rest of our vehicle.