UPM RACING

Founded in 2003 by a group of enthusiastic students of industrial engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, UPM Racing is the very first formula student team in Spain. We designed and participated in international Formula Student competitions with internal combustion cars until 2017, and from 2018 onwards with EVs, although we did both simultaneously in 2011 an 2012, becoming the first EV Formula Student team in Spain, proving once again that we have always been at the vanguard of engineering.

Right now we are focused in designing our first EV with an autonomous system integrated as well, which is a project that has been in development since 2020, with our driverless division developing the codes and perfecting their perception, path planning and control.

But coding is not the only thing necessary, we also require high quality, robust and precise electronics, with the PCBs being one of the most important parts of them, as they are what sustains and connects the circuits that we design. Being such a fundamental part of our car, we require the built quality to be of the higher quality, which is why we would like to be awarded a PCBWAY sponsorship, so that our PCBs can be of the same quality as our designs.

Here is an overview of some of our electrical systems that require PCBs:

TSAL

The Tractive System Active Light is one of the most important systems in the whole car, as it indicates whether the car is electrically safe to work on. To do this, the PCB must detect if there is high voltage in the vehicle side of the HV accumulator and inside the inverters, and if certain conditions defined in the rules are being met. If they are, a light located on top of the car must turn on intermittently in red, if there's no HV and the car is safe, the light must turn on continuously in green.

Our HV detection system ends up dissipating a lot of heat due to the semiconductors that compose it, and we've had some problems in the past with this, but we solved it by implementing some copper planes to dissipate the heat and increasing the thickness of the copper layers. While this solution works well, it has made the HV detection PCB quite expensive, which is an area in which a PCBWAY sponsorship would also help us greatly.

SIGNAL HANDLING

In order to achieve the highest signal integrity possible we have implemented some PCBs that take the analogue signals from the sensors and then forward the information via CAN to the ECU.

These PCBs have a four layer stack-up, with a ground plane and a supply plane in the inner layers and then two copper pours connected to ground on the outer layers, to ensure signal integrity and noise protection.

BMS

We have our own BMS designed in-house. It’s composed of 3 different PCBs, the BMS Master that is the main processing unit of the BMS and handles all the signals of the entire system, as well as turning on and off the cooling system of the accumulator, then the BMS Slave which are 12 PCBs placed above the cells and in charge of gathering information about them such as temperature and voltage of each one of them. Lastly we have 6 PCBs placed right on top of the cells that have two purposes, to interconnect each of the cell stacks and to send the voltage measurements to the BMS Slaves.

Being such a delicate and important part of our design, we have to make sure that the build quality is up to the same standards, which is why we must trust a reputable manufacturer with this task.

CONCLUSION

We would like to be sponsored by PCBWAY because they have a long history of manufacturing high-quality, reliable hardware, but also of supporting projects such as ours, becoming an important contributor to the future of engineering. Having a sponsorship from a company like PCBWAY will help us get to the next level.