A university-industry partnership with Newbury Electronics is helping University of Bath students to develop their own electric race-car, which they plan to compete with at Silverstone.
Silverstone already recognises Team Bath Racing as the UK’s top team with a petrol car. With the help of Newbury Electronics a new team of students, Team Bath Racing electric are hoping to replicate the success of their peers with an electric racecar.
“The University of Bath has a strong and well respected department of Electronic Engineering”
The students have been working together to design and build an electric high-performance vehicle for the Formula Student competition. The competition sees over 600 universities competing worldwide to design and build a single-seat race car.
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As well as providing sponsorship, Berkshire’s Newbury Electronics that specialise in manufacturing printed circuit boards (PCBs), has provided PCBs for the Team Bath’s racing vehicle.
We caught up with Philip King, MD of Newbury Electronics, to find out more: “The University of Bath has a strong and well respected department of Electronic Engineering. We have within our business opportunities for excellent electronic engineering graduates.”
Students also had a chance to visit Newbury Electronics to see how the PCBs are manufactured. Final year student Robert Macgregor says that, “It was really useful to visit Newbury Electronics and get a real understanding of how much work is involved to produce one PCB.” He will use the experience gained and the company’s continued technical support to help design an electric bike that will be racing on the world renowned Isle of Man TT Circuit in May.
Industry involvement
While the University wants to inspire students from all engineering disciplines to collaborate on challenging and motivating projects, Jon Hawkins, technical director at Newbury Innovation, calls for more industry involvement.
“We all need to invest some of our time and experience in helping those currently undergoing training and education to reach their full potential”
Jon believes that the wider electronics industry could also do more to engage with the engineers of the future: “We all need to invest some of our time and experience in helping those currently undergoing training and education to reach their full potential which will in turn enable us to flourish.”
Rob asks the general public to support the motorcycle team by following them on Twitter @b0emotorcycles In addition to this, if any companies or individuals would like to help support the project they can find information on b0emotorcycles website about sponsorship.
If you’re a student at the University of Bath and would like to get involved with the Team Bath Racing, or if you like the sound of what they are doing and are interested in financially or otherwise supporting the project, then they welcome any level of help. Get in contact through the Team Bath Racing website.
Via: The Engineer
