Electric Superbike Twente

Electric Superbike Twente is a student team consisting of 15 enthusiastic people that work on building an electric superbike. The team was founded in 2017, which makes us still a very young team.

This year we will build the third generation bike. The first bike, the Liion-GP, became the European Champion in the Electric Championship and of course we aim to match this result! The vision of Electric Superbike Twente is to show that electric mobility is not only sustainable but also lightning fast and spectacular. We want to beat the MotoGP lap times within a period of five years. To reach this goal, our mission for this year’s team is to make a lighter and more agile bike. To achieve this, we are going to reduce the bike’s weight by 50 kilograms, compared to the previous bike! This will improve the bike’s handling through the corners and ensure faster lap times.

Within Electric Superbike Twente we have three subteams. We have a Chassis team, the Powertrain team and a Communications team. Each subteam is responsible for a different task. The Chassis team works on the structural part of the bike, like the frame, electromotor and the battery casing. The Communications team is busy working on the marketing strategies, organising events and recruiting partners.

The third subteam is the Powertrain team. Our Powertrain engineers are responsible for all the electric components of the bike. This includes designing and making all the hardware like the ECU, Battery Management System (BMS), and UI, but also the software development. Next to that, the powertrain engineers have to work very closely together with the chassis engineers to make sure every component is provided with our energy from the batteries and given the right directions.

This year our Powertrain engineers will have the challenge to integrate the BMS with our cells, so we need less wiring. This will result in having a lighter and more compact battery pack. Next to designing every electrical component, our engineers produce all our pcb’s themselves, together with the help of our partners. After the production phase our most important phase starts; the testing phase. At this time, we will be able to check if every component works as it should and adjust the software where needed.

To give you a better view on the power we are racing with, here are some specifications. Our battery pack (consisting of 495 lithium polymer cells) provides:

• 700 V

• 170 A

• 120 kW

With all this power on board, the superbike can accelerate form 0-200 km/h within 7 seconds and will have a top speed of around 230 km/h.

To create a bike that can reach these speeds we need a lot of powertrain engineers within our team. Currently we have 2 fulltime members and 3 part time members in our powertrain team, but we can use some more manpower (or female power!). Have you become enthusiastic after reading this, don’t hesitate to contact us via www.electricsuperbiketwente.nl/joinnow and maybe you can help us build the best electric superbike so far!