Through the outback with a lightning fast solar car

The Top Dutch Solar Racing team consists of students from mbo, hbo and wo: from Hanzehogeschool, Friesland College, Noorderpoort and the University of Groningen. Each does what he or she is strongest in: organisation, engineering, electronics or communication. "That collaboration in such a diverse team went extremely well," says Eline Hesta, a communications student at Hanze University and responsible for communications within the 2019 race team. "When you put such different people together, you can complement each other in a very nice way."

The team was working under time pressure and on a limited budget. Building and testing all kinds of different models of cars is then obviously not possible. That's where the supercomputer enters the scene. By simulating the car's aerodynamics in the computer, you can improve your design before actually building the model.

The more detailed and realistic your simulation model, the more computing power and memory you need. Jussi Vuopionpera, responsible for operations & sponsorships at the Top Dutch Solar Racing team 2019 and a bioinformatics student at the Hanzehogeschool: "To perform the calculations, we used a hundred CPUs, central processing units, on the supercomputer. As a result, a simulation took only a few hours on average. We couldn't do such simulations on an ordinary PC because it simply doesn't have enough memory."