WHO ARE WE?
The EPFL Racing Team is a Formula Student team founded by students in autumn 2017. Each year, our team designs and develops an electric racing car. We take part in various competitions across Europe, in which we compete against other universities.
Our Committee
Aerodynamics
The EPFL Racing Team’s “Aero” division is responsible for the design and manufacturing of the car’s aerodynamic kit. Its main objective is to control the airflow around the car, not only to generate sufficient downforce (for better stability and control in high-speed corners), but also to ensure the most efficient cooling for the car’s performance.
To achieve this, the EPFL Racing Team’s aerodynamicists have to go through an intense design period, during which they are constantly bouncing back and forth between CAD designs and CFD simulations. It’s a continuous process of designing a part, simulating it and analyzing the results and performance presented in the simulation to understand where the design needs to evolve for the next iterations. In aerodynamics, performance and efficiency gains are always possible. That’s why the division sets itself a design freeze deadline, after which it starts production of the car’s parts. These are optimized and produced entirely in carbon fiber to ensure a perfect compromise between lightness and structural resistance.
Finally, to a slightly lesser extent, the aerodynamic kit, allied to the chassis, is responsible for the car’s visual appearance, giving it the most elegant silhouette.
Battery Energy Storage System
The BESS division is in charge of designing the car’s high-voltage battery, which is the energy source enabling the car to move (with the help of inverters and motors). In a way, it’s the heart of the car.
This year, the division’s objectives are, firstly, to improve this year’s battery, which is to be used for a second year. And secondly, to develop a completely new battery with new cells, new packaging and a new cooling system to maximize the car’s performance for 2024-2025.
Chassis
The Chassis and Cockpit Division is responsible for optimizing the structure of the vehicle and its cockpit. The main objective is to efficiently optimize the mechanical integration of electronic components into the car. In this way, the composite monocoque can be designed to be as compact as possible. The cockpit is designed to be ergonomic, lightweight and adaptable to individual preferences. Our components are characterized by a balance between lightweight construction, rigidity and ergonomics to ensure safety and comfort.
SPONSORING
The Sponsorship division plays a key role in ensuring the resources needed for the success of the association. It establishes strategic partnerships with companies, creates tailored proposals to attract sponsors, and maintains long-term relationships with them. By highlighting the benefits of collaborating with our project, this division secures the funding and material support essential to achieving our goals.
Communication & Logistics
The Logistics division is at the heart of the association’s organization. It coordinates resources, plans trips, and manages the supply of materials for our activities and competitions. By overseeing every organizational detail, it ensures that everything runs smoothly, allowing the team to focus entirely on technical performance.
The Communication division is dedicated to promoting the association’s image and enhancing its visibility. Through social media management, content creation, and campaign organization, it shares our progress, engages our community, and draws the attention of sponsors and partners. Its goal is to convey our passion and build a strong identity that inspires and unites.
Driverless software
The Driverless Software division implements algorithms to replace the driver’s brain and thus make the car 100% autonomous. First, the vision and localization algorithms detect the circuit and find their way around it. Secondly, the control algorithm calculates how to turn the steering wheel and press the pedals. We’ll be taking part in our first autonomous competition in the summer of 2023.
Vehicle Dynamics & Control
This is THE division responsible for optimizing car performance to achieve the best lap times in competition. To achieve this, the division focuses on 5 areas.
It all starts with the study of tires, because the contact zones (the points of contact between the rubber and the road) are the key elements in extracting performance from a race car. So we start by comparing and selecting the best compound, and then we model it mathematically to make its data usable.
With this data, we know in what situation the tire performs to its full potential, and we can then design the suspension (what we call the wire) to optimize the tire’s presentation. This is how we place all the suspension points, making sure through simulations that we achieve maximum performance for every movement of the car, although this constantly requires compromises. And yes, in automotive dynamics, there’s no such thing as a perfect response, and it’s a constant iterative process.
To iterate the results and know if we’re on the right track, we’re developing a lap time simulator that takes into account the car’s parameters, a circuit and provides us with the car’s minimum lap time. This enables us to compare our various design choices in terms of their performance gains. This stage requires a good knowledge of the theory as well as a good command of the code (Matlab/Simulink).
Now it’s time to move on from the computers to the race track and test the car. The testing and validation phase is crucial. By placing numerous sensors on the car, we gather as much data as possible to adjust the car to its optimum configuration. It’s also an opportunity to gather feedback from the drivers to adapt the car to their preferences. It’s time to “burn the tires”!
The final step in this quest for performance is vehicle control. Using tire data, car parameters and condition estimation, we control the engine commands so that the car is always used to its full potential, always flirting with the limit.
This is how our division contributes to the car’s overall performance: we look for every tenth, every hundredth that can bring us closer to the podium.
Business Plan
Logistics is the process of obtaining, transporting and storing resources. It manages operational areas and warehouses. This division looks after the organization of members during competitions, and aims to improve the stability of the entire supply chain.
power Electronics & Low Voltage
Power Electronics is the division that deals with engines, inverters and everything else that goes with them. This year, the division’s main objective is to optimize the systems implemented on last season’s car, Ariane, which was our first 4-wheel-drive car. The division is therefore working on a new inverter cooling design, a test bench to learn more about the engines, and the development of in-house SiC inverters.
The low-voltage system is the equivalent of the car’s nervous system.
The division’s roles are to design the data transfer networks throughout the vehicle, the high-voltage battery management system, the electrical safety systems, and to manufacture the low-voltage battery powering all these elements.
To fulfill these tasks, its members design the majority of the car’s PCBs (printed circuit boards) and program the software that will orchestrate them, such as the touch-sensitive dashboard and the battery management system.
It is also their role to design and assemble a large part of the vehicle’s cable harness.
Mechanical Systems
Software & Sensors
The Software & Sensors division is responsible for everything to do with the car’s data, the IT behind it, and the tools needed to make our cars the most optimized and connected.
Without our team, we’d be working on the selection, mechanical and electrical integration of multiple sensors. The data acquisition part, also known as telemetry, is crucial for the whole team: it’s where we can visualize the car’s data in real time during our tests and races. We centralize our processing in an SbRio, our division is responsible for implementing certain logic in this controller and, of course, no software without debugging!
Finally, in addition to the aforementioned data acquisition sensor, we also work on vital sensors for control, such as INS and our latest work, RTK GNSS, a satellite positioning technique that allows us to obtain a very precise position of our car, which can then provide us with acceleration, speed and other data at a rapid rate for our control team to work with.
This division is at the crossroads of all the other divisions, as we strive to make and keep our car connected, and are constantly working to achieve high-performance computing with our IT tools.
support our TEam
If you would like to become a partner and contribute to the development of this team, send us an email on epfl-racing-team@epfl.ch
or call us on +41 76 521 55 38.
You can find more information here.
You can also make an online donation by clicking on the button below.