Forze: From Uncertainty to Unshakable Performance

Blog 2 Eurocircuits & Forze

The Forze IX is the latest car our team from Forze Hydrogen Racing is working on. With a group of about 40 volunteering students, we work every day on making the fastest hydrogen-powered race car in the world. For a couple of years now multiple teams from Forze have been working on the Forze IX to reach this milestone. At the start of our year, we deemed the car developed enough that our team set the goal to be the first team to actually participate in a race with the Forze IX. For this we needed to improve and implement some major systems of the car. One of these systems was our embedded system, when we started the car had a working embedded system, however it was not reliable enough to race with. This forced us to look critically at the embedded system as it was and determine its weakest parts.

The main focus of our team would therefore be upgrading the nodes in our car, we call them DINs, to become more reliable. The DINs are responsible for bundling the data from sensors and distributing the instructions for actuators. Our car works with a centralized embedded system, meaning that all the data is processed in a single “brain” of the car. In order to prevent an immense amount of cables running through the car, we make use of these DINs. As mentioned before, the DINs bundle the data, so instead of a lot of smaller wires, we have a few data highways running through the car. The challenge for our year was to make the DINs more reliable as they play such an important role in the functioning of the car. These PCBs required a significant redesign and would therefore require multiple engineers to work on this component for a full year. This is where Eurocircuits helped us, with their reliable service and advanced assembling capabilities, we didn’t have to worry about assembling the PCBs ourselves, leaving more time for designing the PCBs. The DINs turned out to be much more reliable and up to the standards we want them to be.

Unfortunately, one week before the race we encountered an issue in the gearbox of one of the wheels, which made the car unable to race. This was a huge disappointment for the team as one can probably imagine. Since we had one wheel left to drive, instead of racing, we were able to drive a demo lap on the circuit of Assen. Even though this was not what we strived to achieve, in our tests leading up to the race, we were able to test the new and improved DINs. During these tests, our efforts turned out to be worth it. The DIN went from being one of the weaker parts of our embedded system, to the marvel of engineering it is now.  Therefore the demolap was still a great way to show the world our new car on track for the first time. Because of this ambitious goal, we were able to make major improvements to the Forze IX, getting it very close to racing. As some members in our team said: “The race would have been the cherry on the cake, but still the cake was extremely tasteful”.

The next team will continue with the Forze IX and will focus on having the car participate in a race. That is what makes our student team unique, our year might have ended but the development of the Forze IX definitely has not. This is exactly what highlights the mission of Forze; showing the world the possibilities of hydrogen. We do that by building a race car competing against petrol cars. As this is an ambitious project, it makes it an extremely challenging but educational environment for students that join our team for various reasons.

For more information please visit the Forze Hydrogen Racing website.