Sun-Powered Champions: Brunel Solar Team's Nuna 12s

Brunel Solar Team – Nuna 12s

The Brunel Solar Team consists of 11 students from TU Delft. With their newest solar car, Nuna 12s, they aim to inspire the world in the fields of sustainability and technical innovations.

In September 2024, the team will compete in the Sasol Solar Challenge in South Africa for the fifth time. During this race, the team will strive to cover as many kilometers as possible over 8 days, traveling from Johannesburg to Cape Town. They are determined to defend their four-time championship title in South Africa!

Eurocircuits and the Brunel Solar Team

The Brunel Solar Team has a clear goal in mind: winning the Sasol Solar Challenge 2024! This race presents various conditions. Eurocircuits supports the team by producing custom-designed circuit boards for the Nuna 12s. This flexibility allows the team to fine-tune their electrical systems, leading to weight reduction and increased efficiency. This helps them build the most efficient solar car!

Technical Aspects

Being the only source of energy during the Sasol solar challenge, the solar panel is of absolute importance. This requires optimizing every aspect and never settling. Even though building a solar panel integrated in a car is an ambitious goal to achieve in only a year. The best solar panel is lightweight, highly organized and reliable and comes with many electronical components attached.

To mount and connect these components, we use the PCBs made by Eurocircuits. This allows for a more organized and reliable result. The versatility of Eurocircuits’ manufacturing of PCBs allowed us to optimize for weight and resistive losses, as well as making the PCBs very compact to fit into the aerodynamic body of the car. Below you can see a picture of one of the the PCBs. You can see the pads to which wires can be soldered. The components are placed on the back of the PCB, and you can see that they are connected to the wires through via’s. Now all the components placed upon the PCB will automatically connected to the car by the schematics of the PCB.