Hydriven: The Green Revolution!

HyDriven

HyDriven is a student team that consists of 30 driven full-time students from the University of Twente & Saxion University of Applied Sciences in Enschede. We aim to prove the potential of hydrogen to accelerate the energy transition towards zero-emission.

To achieve this goal, we build a race car to compete in the worldwide Formula Student competitions. Within this competition, we are the only team to build a hydrogen-powered car and we strive to get more teams to transition to hydrogen. As the biggest Formula Student competition eliminated the combustion class just this year, we are hopeful to achieve this goal.

HyDriven just rebranded and was formerly known as Green Team Twente. However, our story started before we entered the Formula Student competition. Since 2011, we have been building a super-efficient hydrogen car which they competed with in the Shell-Eco Marathon, won multiple prizes, and became world champions. To keep pushing the boundaries of hydrogen and innovating, Green Team Twente decided to take on a new challenge by building a hydrogen race car with greater power and speed.

Building this car requires us develop our own PCBs for it's control and safety systems. For some of our systems, we needed many revisions or needed replacements in a short amount of time. Eurocircuits has been an especially helpful partner in these cases due to their reliability and quick delivery times. A couple weeks before formula student Netherlands, our first race of the year, we discovered we might not have sufficient backup TSAL satellite boards to get through the technical inspection. These PCBs are used to indicate whether the high voltage system of our car is turned on. Fortunately, Eurocircuits was able to deliver them in time for the race!

This year, we managed to set up a hydrogen class with Formula Student France, next to the combustion, electric, and driverless classes. Together, we set up a plan to convince other student teams and build the class with appropriate rules. After two years of adjusting to the Formula Student rules, we successfully built a hydrogen-powered Formula Student car; Nebula drove her first meters on hydrogen already! In France, we hope to achieve our greatest mile yet and compete with this car.