One of the big differences between the FSAE competition/SAE Baja competition and the FSAE Electric Competition is the volume of extra documentation required of the teams. Electric teams can expect to send in 4 extra documents with over 120 more pages of paperwork. The Electrical Systems Form can account for 100 of these pages. It is a technical report describing all electrical systems on the car controls/Safety and Tractive System (Battery and Powertrain Teams).

The report requires testing data, wiring designs, components used (as well as spec sheets of components used) and CAD drawings describing the physical locations of all components. The report also has to have a fully linked table of contents, list of tables, list of figures, and internal links to all spec sheets and sections using components with the included spec sheets with external links to the full spec sheet (something that took us 20+ hours to complete because the quick process had to be repeated hundreds of times) We turned in our first revision of the Electrical Systems Form (ESF) to Formula SAE back in February however some of the links weren’t working. So we submitted our first revision.

On March 14th we woke up to an updated status of our latest submission. Now that all the links were working, Formula SAE was able to give us a lot of helpful advice and ask for clarification on things like the maintenance plugs between battery modules. “How are the maintenance plugs implemented? Insulated? Positive locking?” (FSAE rules require that the battery packs be separated into different modules no greater than 120VCD and 6MJ with maintenance plugs separating the modules. The maintenance plugs have to be removable without tools of any kind.) We included a spec sheet of the chosen maintenance plugs including all of the information, but they want it written in the document which is understandable when a reviewer of these documents can expect to read around 5,000 pages of reports from teams from across the world.