Circontrol promotes technical expertise for UPC’s ecoRacing project

With this collaboration, the manufacturer consolidates its position as a benchmark for industrial technical knowledge and collaboration with the educational community

The EV charging and smart parking solutions’ manufacturer, Circontrol, began a close collaboration this October with the ecoRacing competition team of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Terrassa. This project, which is working on the construction and performance of the 100% electric and autonomous ecoRD racing vehicle, involves a participation in the Formula Student engineering competition, in which teams of students from all over the world compete in several countries to assess the technology, operation and perfection of the vehicles they have created. Circontrol, which had already previously participated in the project, is also extending its commitment to support technical knowledge in its local environment through this collaboration, among other actions.

This project between Circontrol and the ecoRacing team will last approximately 7 months, until next April, and will involve the participation of professionals from different areas of the manufacturer’s staff to improve the ecoRD through different facets, always helped from several departments of the company.  Specifically, the collaboration will focus on improving different technical aspects related to the performance of the racing car and its power based on three fundamental ways: on the one hand, it will involve an optimisation of its charging system with a custom-made external charger to triple the charging power; on the other hand, it will involve a complete overhaul of the car’s power train, with special attention to engine control, and finally it will focus on an update of the vehicle’s battery control architecture.

From the training point of view, the collaboration with Circontrol will allow UPC students to carry out an intensive training project in which they will work closely with the most technical departments of the manufacturer. For the company, this is a way of contributing to the technical and industrial knowledge of future engineers who, in turn, may end up forming part of the staff of the manufacturer. According to Quim Segura, captain of the ecoRacing team of the UPC, “the collaboration with Circontrol will allow us to grow even more as engineers and receive a quality assessment and advice on the current design of key elements for the operation of our prototype“.

For Segura, the Formula Student experience means “training in a real and very demanding project, and also doing it in very technical and specialised fields; this means that, added to what we learn in the university degree, we are trained in a complete way and at the end of our studies we’d have already acquired theoretical, practical and technical knowledge of quality“. “We believe it is vital that projects like ours are always learning from leading companies through technological innovation, in order to know what technologies the market will demand in the future, and thus to be able to train in a better way” Segura states. For his part, Antoni Mª Grau, Director of Corporate Development of Circontrol, remarks that with this collaboration, “Circontrol wants to position itself as a pole of importance in technical and industrial knowledge in Catalonia and throughout the country, not only as a manufacturer of electric vehicle chargers, but as an expert of everything that surrounds the integration of the electric vehicles into our lives“.

In this sense, Grau recalls that the company has already made significant efforts in recent years to work on its technical excellence: “in just under a year, Circontrol has made a giant leap in different fields, but especially in terms of usability and technological research, overcoming difficulties such as the German Eichrecht metrological regulation (pioneering and highly demanding), and expanding our laboratory to test all the processes of the chargers at our headquarters in Viladecavalls“. Having this evolution in mind, “I think it is positive that we share this knowledge for the training of engineers who, in the end, will end up finding the solutions of the future“, Grau concludes.