Revolve NTNU

In 2015, Revolve NTNU placed 4th in Austria's Formula Student competition, giving this year's team the confidence and inspiration to build an even more cutting edge vehicle with further developed technology. Last season, the team consisted of 55 members, 11 of which were master's students. Ten of these students wrote master's theses on the competition car, Gnist. Team 2016 successfully designed, developed and built Scandinavia's first ever 4WD electric race car. This meant the team had to completely redesign everything about the way we previously produced the our more conventional compression race cars. This lead to innovation in aerodynamics, suspension, the monocoque, torque vectoring, and our (KERS) regenerative braking. Our main partner, Kongsberg Gruppen, helped us develop and produce our newly designed monocoque while giving our engineers great advice during the process. Besides having great partners working alongside us, we also had speakers like Dirk Ahlborn present great ideas like the development of Elon Musk's hyperloop concept. This type of collaboration is necessary when producing a sustainable and efficient Formula Student race car. This is why we make sure to showcase our sponsors at an all-day event called "Revolve Day" where students from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, among others, can learn about what we do and why we do it. But more importantly, we, the Revolve NTNU team along with our sponsors, get to engage with other students to talk about our wonderful experiences in developing northern Europe's fastest electric race car. On the 3rd of May, we unveiled our car with Christian Hauglie-Hanssen, the Executive Vice President of Space & Surveillance at Kongsberg Defence Systems. It wasn't long before our first and largest competition with Formula Student UK at Silverstone. Gnist performed well here, finishing in 6th place out of 130 other teams in the acceleration event. Our exhilaration of accomplishment was unfortunately cut short due to a failure with Gnist's battery management system. The failure suppressed our power limiter, causing us to draw more power than this event's 60 kW limit allowed for. Despite this, the managed to win several prizes for its innovative solutions: Jaguar Land Rover Award For Innovation in Propulsion Systems, Class 1 Best High Voltage Powertrain Implementation by Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains. At this point, the team had merely one week of testing available before Formula Student Austria. Although our testing timespan was limited, we successfully finished 6th place overall! Gnist had yet to realised its full potential, due to high temperatures in the inverter and distinct grip conditions and we had still come close to winning the competition. We were satisfied with our performance and end result, but we are always looking to improve. As always, everyone at Red Bull Ring provided a very friendly atmosphere, with fewer teams and a more relaxed attitude building up to the most prestigious competition, Formula Student Germany. With engineers and great brands and names present (Audi, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch just to name a few). Things to mention here was a stunning 5th place in Engineering Design, which apart from the Endurance event, is considered as the most prestigious event. Unfortunately for us, a DNF in the Endurance event due to technical issues in the gearbox near the end of the stint, caused us to lose potential points in the competition.