Bern Racing Team: Innovating for the Future

Blog by the Bern Racing Team

BERN RACING TEAM

The Bern Racing Team, or BRT, is an association from the Bern University of Applied Science in Switzerland that aims to design, build, and race a 100% electric race car which will participate in the prestigious competition of Formula Student.

We have been creating electric race cars since 2014 and have since then produced 7 amazing Formula Student vehicles.

Coming off the heels of an amazing season with “Nebula”, our 2022-2023 competitor, we are now focusing on the design and production of our new race car, “Sajetta”.

Thanks to the years of knowledge and fine tuning brought to our cars, we now have a strong and reliable base we can build upon.

Our goal this season is to focus on vehicle performance while keeping the car extremely reliable.

We aim to focus mainly on weight optimisation as well as energy management and driver comfort. By designing each part to be as light as possible, we are aiming to reduce the weight of our previous car by 10%.

With our new recuperative braking system, we can now focus on energy management and be able to push the car’s limits in terms of energy deployment.

Driver comfort is also extremely important to us, and we have studied the ergonomics of the car to provide for the best driving experience.

The current team consists of 55 Bachelor students, all working tirelessly next to their studies. Our members come from various degrees such as Automotive, Electrical, Mechanical, Mechatronics systems, Computer science and Business engineering.

Sajetta will keep the main overall concept as last season while optimizing many points which will ultimately make it faster.

This season, we are continuing our partnership with Eurocircuits who provide the PCBs for our race car. Eurocircuits ensure that our PCBs are produced to very high standards and are very reliable and fast.

We are extremely happy that this partnership can continue.

Let’s take a look at the PCBs produced at Euroricuits!

1.1 AMS Interface

The AMS (Accumulator Management System) board is a communication interface between the HV AMS slave boards and the HV master microcontroller.

1.2 BSPD PCB

The BSPD PCB ensures safety by monitoring brake pressure and motor power, triggering a shutdown if implausible conditions occur.

1.3 Cooling board

T he cooling board serves as a CAN interface for the cooling equipment we have on the car. This board also simplifies assembly and allows us to install less cables.

1.4 Distribution Board

The distribution board has the task of distributing the signals and power to all other components. The compact design with integrated fuse block saves space and installation effort.

1.5 HV Board

The HV Board monitors the discharge circuit, Tractive System Active Light (TSAL), and battery voltage. This board ensures a long LED service life and a correct discharge of the DC link voltage.

1.6 HV Master

The HV Master PCB performs various tasks. It controls many components of our car and battery such as the Battery Management System, the Insulation Measurement Device (IMD) and HV logic to name a few.

1.7 Pedalbox Board

The pedal box board measures the steering angle sensor, two accelerator pedal sensors, two brake pressure sensors for the two brake circuits and a force sensor on the brake pedal. The measured analog values are digitized, filtered, and transmitted to the control unit via CAN. Compared to direct wiring to the ECU, this solution saves installation work, cables and therefore weight.

1.8 SDC GPIO

This board is used to measure the voltages in the shutdown circuit and passes them on to the CAN bus. The various voltage measurements allow us to find the interruption in the shutdown circuit faster, e.g. whether the Brake Over Travel Switch (BOTS) has been triggered or whether an emergency stop switch has been actuated.

We are extremely happy about the quality of Eurocircuits’s PCBs and cherish this partnership!