Building a highly efficient vehicle prototype

About the competition

Shell Eco-Marathon is a global competition conceived in 1939 by a group of researchers from the Shell company. The event is held annually in three different places (Asia, Europe and Americas). Its purpose is to incentivize students from across the globe to design, build and drive the most highly efficient car in order to achieve the highest possible marks in one of the available energy categories such as diesel (for internal combustion engines) or electric.

Aside from energy type, the vehicles are also divided in two different classes: Prototype, which emphasizes efficiency over anything else and UrbanConcept with cars with a more practical design. In 2016, a new stage for the competition was set in Brazil, our team's current objective.

Team Ecocar

Team Ecocar was brought to life in 2004 by a group of students from the Mechanical Engineering College at Unicamp (State University of Campinas) in Campinas, Brazil. As of now, Ecocar is comprised of 28 students from over 5 different disciplines.

My name is Carlos André Nunes. I study Electric Engineering at Unicamp and am a member of the team’s Electric Department, in charge of matters concerning the electric vehicle being built for the competition this year.

Currently, Ecocar is engaged in building a high efficiency electric vehicle prototype to partake Shell Eco-Marathon Brazil, that is going to happen around november this year. Competitors from all over the country are going to show up at the event and try to run their prototypes a set number of laps determined by the organization of the competition (12 laps in 2016), with the least amount of fuel consumed.

The car has a 8 kg 6061-T6 aluminum chassis (it has to be light to improve efficiency). It uses a 840 W, 8 poles brushless DC motor. To control the motor we have a set of two boards, one dealing with the logic control and the other dealing with higher current flow, therefore running the motor (presenting the three half-bridges to control the three motor phases). As demanded by the organization of the competition we use a 48 V Li-ion battery as a power supply.

                What we would like from PCBWay is to have you print our voltage regulator for our car’s horn. For practicality and price a 12 V horn is used in the car, being necessary to regulate the input voltage on the horn.