newsletter-of-march

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Newsletter for March

We have already reached February! It has been an exciting month finalizing our designs ahead of our Design Reveal! Apart from that, we have already begun with dyno testing and are diligently working on restoring Mirage-Evo to be race ready once again. Furthermore, we are happy to announce that we have opened our recruitment period for next year's edition of Electric Superbike Twente. This and more are covered in this month's newsletter.

Production Phase

This month marks the transition to a new phase of completing our next generation motorcycle: production. After months of hard work by the whole team, the full design is finished. We focused on reducing the total weight, making our electrical systems more efficient, and improving our reliability. As final highlight of the design phase, we presented the improved design at our design reveal last month, but more on that later in this newsletter.

In summary, with the new design, we managed to reduce the total weight from 185kg to 145kg, a reduction of more than 20%. With this reduction in weight and the more efficient systems, our top speed will exceed 200 km/h, opposed to 180km/h from last year. Finally, our 0-100 time will drop from 7.0 seconds to less than 5 seconds.

With the design finalised, we can begin ordering all of the materials needed for producing each component. Our partners can expect quite some orders coming in! This phase also comes with some additional challenges, as we are no longer dependent on only ourselves. We need to make sure we have good communication with our suppliers to maximize production efficiency. The first big delivery has already been delivered to our workshop: the battery cells. In total we will use 510 cells in the entire batterypack!

Keyshot

We used Keyshot extensively in the preparation of our design reveal. Keyshot is 3D rendering software that can convert CAD models into lifelike images and animations. Thanks to this software, we were able to convincingly present our design to the public. The Keyshot renderings made our design look almost real!

With the help of Keyshot, we were able to show, among other things, how exactly our battery pack is constructed and how all components are integrated into the frame. Now that we have been able to share this realistic design with everyone, the public has a clear idea of what our electric racing motorcycle will look like at the end of this year.

Now it's time to make the design visualized in Keyshot a reality. We are extremely grateful for the collaboration with Keyshot and are already looking forward to the animations and visualizations of the coming years!

Design Reveal review

A perspective from Max, our team manager on his experience during our design reveal. “I was blown out of the water by the attendance and interest in the design reveal. We anticipated on around 100 to 120 people, but eventually presented in front of a room of well over 150 people! The amount of partners, friends and familiy attending really showed us how much interest these different groups have in our project, which is a big motivator for us.

I am really proud of our teammembers for the amount and quality of work that has been done, and the ability to present it in a clear manner to engineers and non-engineers alike. All in all, I would call it a great succes!”

VDL ETG Almelo

VDL ETG Almelo has been a partner for multiple years now, sharing their technical expertise when necessary and supporting the project. Next to this, VDL ETG Almelo works together with Aeronamic, Benchmark and ETC to provide us with a Running Dinner, which gives us the opportunity to meet and connect with the engineers in the working field. This way, we help eachother bridge the gap between students and engineers at these High Tech companies.

Recruitment!!!

Our recruitment drive is still ongoing for the upcoming season and we are still looking for motivated students to join the team. This is a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience in high-performance electric vehicle development, working alongside a multidisciplinary team on cutting-edge engineering, management, and communications challenges. If you are interested in contributing to the future of electric racing, you can sign up via our application form: https://electricsuperbiketwente.nl/join-now/

To learn more about the team and meet current members, we will be hosting a few more interest events at the Future Factory in the coming weeks, including interest drinks and lunches on 7 April, 15 April, and 23 April. These informal sessions are a great opportunity to ask questions and discover how you can get involved. The application deadline is 1 May; we are excited to welcome the next generation of team members.

Powertrain Review

With our design reveal also came our design deadline. With the end of this phase comes the start of our next phase. Production. The chassis subteam is now really busy with setting out the production planning and ordering materials, for the powertrain subteam this works a bit differently. We have already ordered one, and for the BMU even two, iterations of PCBs, and have since been busy with debugging them. Some small errors have been filtered out, and we are preparing to order another iteration.

Iterating is essential in the design of electronics, as sometimes it is impossible to know whether something will work or not when it is not physically in your hand. But, as the powertrain subteam we have more responsibilities than just designing PCBs: we also have to write software for them. At the start of this year, we received evaluation boards of the chips we are going to use in our designs. This means we can already write software even if we do not have our own PCB yet. The software for the new electronics, therefore, is already almost done, and we are focusing on other software projects aimed at improving performance and maintainability.

In the following months, we will be busy with iterating on both our electrical and software designs. After that, there are also other exciting projects on the horizon, like, for example, motor control.

Eurocircuits

Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are a key element of building an electric superbike, and we have many of them in our motorcycle. The powertrain subteam builds custom CAN nodes, a BMU, CMU, BDU, Telemetry node, and more. And even though the acronyms may mean nothing to the average reader, all of them are integral to the (safe) functioning of the bike.

That is why we are very proud to have Eurocircuits as a partner. For over 30 years, Eurocircuits has been the trusted, local expert in making PCBs. It is very easy to order via their online portal, and the delivery times are short.

We thank Eurocircuits for their support in helping us preserve racing for future generations!

Upcoming Events

7th of April: Future Factory student team interest drink
11-2th of April: Tech Beach
15th of April: Future Factory student team interest lunch
23rd of April: Future Factory student team interest drink
1st of May: Sign up Deadline!!!

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