The Development of a Charger for the Formula Student Electric Race Car

Industry 4.0. with its inherent complexity of technologies, digitalization and intellectualization encourages universities to look for new innovative approaches in education to provide students with advanced professional competencies. Formula Student Electric is an international student competition consisting in the development of racing cars followed by competitive races. However, accidents can happen not only on the track, but also in the garage. A big problem is charging batteries due to the complexity of controlling such a long process. The market lacks ready-made solutions meeting the requirements of the regulations. We developed a schematic diagram of the charger and designed a simplified model of the CC / CV charging process in Simulink. Theoretical calculations show that the charging time of a battery with a capacity of 100 Ah and a maximum voltage of 42 V, in the case of 30 A, took 3 hours 32 minutes to 100% and 1 hour 47 minutes to 50%, at in the case of 20 A - 5 hours 15 minutes and 2 hours 40 minutes, respectively. We selected the charger components. We designed a 3D model of the rack in the SolidWorks software for the safe use of the charger.