FS Team Tallinn: Celebrating Podium Success with FEST24

FS Team Tallinn in 2024

FS Team Tallinn is a Formula Student team from Tallinn, Estonia consisting of students from Tallinn University of Technology and Tallinn University of Applied Sciences. This year we built our 12th electric car, the FEST24. The car was driving by the beginning of April and after a long testing period we had the best season in our team’s history, with lot of podium finishes at competitions. For the first time in our team’s history, we took overall victory at FS Austria. In addition, we took 2nd place overall at FS East and FS Germany.

One major reason for our success was the reliability of our electronics system, in which Eurocircuits played a significant role. Eurocircuits has been supporting us for the last 2 years and we are extremely happy with their high-quality PCBs and especially quick delivery times.

There are more than 20 self-developed PCBs in FEST24, all of which are supplied by Eurocircuits. One of these is our 24 V DCDC converter, which supplies our entire low voltage system. It has an output power of 500W and is one of the biggest improvements this year with an efficiency of more than 99% and almost twice the power density compared to previous years design. The DCDC converter uses a dual-phase interleaved synchronous buck topology and utilizes state-of-the-art semiconductors. High-precision PCBs from Eurocircuits enabled us to use GaN MOSFETs, which in turn allowed us to eliminate most of the MOSFET losses and reduce the size of the converter.

The converter consists of two PCBs. The lower board facilitates the DCDC converter. The upper board ensures the reliability of the board by measuring the input and output voltages of the DCDC converter as well as the output current. In case of high continuous load at elevated ambient temperatures, an active cooling keeps the temperatures under control, which can be measured in five locations. All necessary information is exchanged over the CAN network.

We look forward to continuing our successful partnership with Eurocircuits in the future and developing even better and higher quality PCBs.