Swiss Solar Boat Develops Hybrid Solar-Hydrogen Foiling Boat

Hey there! We are Swiss Solar Boat, a student-led team from EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), dedicated to designing and building high-performance, sustainable boats powered by renewable energies such as solar power and green hydrogen.

If you've been following our journey, you might remember our first blog post from last year, when we shared our partnership with EuroCircuits and the story of our first solar boat, the Dahu. That one-seater vessel competed at the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge, where it delivered outstanding performances and marked a key milestone in our project's evolution.

Since then, we've continued to push boundaries. After successfully integrating a hydrogen fuel cell into our previous boat, making it a hybrid solar and hydrogen-powered vessel, we're now taking things to the next level: designing and building an entirely new three-passenger foiling boat, powered by a hybrid solar–hydrogen system.

After two full years of intense design work, we've entered the production phase. In any high-performance electric boat, the electronic systems are just as critical as the hull, foils, or propulsion. That's where our custom-designed PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) come in, ensuring efficient energy management, seamless communication between subsystems, and real-time data processing.

This marks the second year of our partnership with EuroCircuits for the manufacturing of our PCBs, you might remember our first collaboration from last year's blog post.

Since the beginning of this partnership, we've been able to produce a wide range of custom PCBs: from simple breakout boards used for testing, to routing boards for our CAN communication line and power distribution, as well as interface boards connecting our microcontrollers to their various sensors.

This year, we've just received the first batch of our new PCBs, a test board for our High-Voltage Motor Propulsion Testbench. 

The testbench consists of two motors mounted face-to-face: one is the propulsion motor that will be used to drive the boat forward, while the other acts as a load simulator. This setup allows us to test and control our propulsion motor under various load and RPM (revolutions per minute) conditions to ensure everything operates smoothly and as intended before integrating the system into the boat.

Both motors are controlled by our Electronic Speed Controllers (ESCs), which are connected to the Speedgoat, the brain of our boat. The ESCs convert the system's continuous high voltage into the three-phase voltage required by the motors and regulate their target speeds. They receive control commands from the Speedgoat via CAN communication.

The Speedgoat, in turn, communicates through a custom PCB interface manufactured by EuroCircuits, which ensures the correct transmission of signals and data between components. This setup allows us to test and characterize our propulsion control system before installation, while the PCB also serves as a convenient dashboard prototype, enabling easy control of the pumps, motors, ESCs, and onboard computer within the testbench.

Thanks to EuroCircuits' rapid delivery, we received our PCBs within a week, enabling much faster design iterations and timely completion of our test campaigns.

For more information please visit the Swiss Solar Boat website.