Team

About 50 students across three subteams: Mechanical, Electrical and Business. Every member owns real work on the car.

Pick where you build.

Open a subteam to see the projects it owns this season.

Aeroshell

Aerodynamics drives a solar car's efficiency. The aeroshell is the car's outer body, shaped to package everything inside with as little drag as possible. The work covers CFD optimization, surface modeling and composites.

Chassis

The chassis is the backbone of the car. Ours has been built from carbon-fiber sandwich panels, and we are moving toward more complex carbon layups. The project goes deep into carbon-fiber composites: hardpoints, molds and layup.

Front/Rear Suspension

Suspension design decides how the car handles and drives. The work covers suspension geometry in CAD, load and failure simulation in FEA, and engineering drawings for manufacturing.

Array Hinge

The array hinge opens the car for access and lets the team tilt the solar array toward the sun while charging. Designing its four-point hinge and linkages is a demanding geometry problem.

Topshell and Canopy

The topshell and canopy are another composites project for the top surface of the car. The topshell mounts the solar panels, along with a hinging canopy for driver access.

Driver Occupancy

The driver cell has many constraints due to regulations and safety, as well as a handful of subcomponents such as a pedal box, seatbelts, steering wheel, roll cage, and more.

Electrical Integration

Electrical integration is the car's nervous system. Working with the electrical team and other mechanical subsystems, it designs the enclosures, mounting brackets and wiring routes that connect the electronics to the rest of the car.

Battery Enclosure

The battery enclosure houses the battery pack, battery management system and cooling, and has to mount into the car in a very specific way. It is also one of the most safety-critical structures on the car. The team works closely with the electrical team to keep the battery fitted, protected and working properly.

Accessory Tools and Integration

A race team needs tools around the car: wheel-changing equipment, custom car jacks, and trailer upgrades such as shelving and work surfaces. This project builds them.

We are looking for dedicated students who are eager to learn and want to work as part of a team.

Steering Wheel

The steering wheel is the primary interface between the driver and the solar car. It provides crucial telemetry to the driver and places control of various lights, a horn, cruise control, and several other features at the driver's fingertips. This is a cross-functional team of electrical and mechanical engineers working together to redesign our current steering wheel with the aim of making it lighter and more practical.

Driver Interface

The driver interface combines the functionalities of our current telemetry and button interface boards. It enables the driver to control the low voltage and high voltage power distribution systems, drive mode select, emergency shutdown, and various other car functions. It sits on our main CAN bus and transmits vital telemetry to our ground team via a cellular TX/RX chip.

Body Controls

The body controls team works with the motor controller, lighting system, and horn. Most of their work will revolve around developing a new printed circuit board to control these components. Additional work includes development and optimization of exterior LEDs and calibration of our motor controller settings.

HV Power Distribution

This team works on our HV/LV power distribution system. They will develop a new power distribution board, Battery Management System, MPPT collector, and will be responsible for testing high-current conductors to ensure they meet safety regulations. Additional work will include development of a custom Maximum Power Point Tracker.

Array

The photovoltaic array is the heart of the solar car. This team designs, builds, encapsulates and optimizes the array that powers it.

Software/Firmware

Firmware and software are everywhere on the solar car. Firmware needs to be written for our embedded systems. Software needs to be written for our custom telemetry dashboard and to optimize race strategy.

Business

Sponsorship, outreach, and everything that keeps the team funded.

What to expect

Time commitment: At least 20 hours a week, and more during build crunch and race week.
Experience required: None. If you stick with it and take the initiative to learn, you can pick up everything you need here.
Your first quarter: A crash course across the whole program, from mechanical to electrical to strategy to race operations.