Belgian Solar Team eyes another world title with new solar car
The Innoptus Solar Team, the team of KU Leuven engineering students who compete in solar car races, has on Monday unveiled their latest solar car in Antwerp in the presence of federal mobility minister Jean-Luc Crucke. With that car, the group will attempt to win a new world title in Australia at the end of August. It’s the Belgian team's first car built to race in the Australian winter.
The new solar car, named Infinite Apollo, is the Innoptus Solar Team’s eleventh car. The KU Leuven team has been around for about twenty years and took home the world title in 2019 and 2023.
The world championship, or Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, takes place every two years and is scheduled again this year. For the first time, the race will be held not in October, but in August. This means that teams not only have less time to develop their cars, but also have to take into account the winter weather and thus less sunlight to charge the cars.
To cope with these changed conditions, several novelties have been incorporated into the design. For instance, the students used two parallel aerodynamic fins, while the previous car had one rotating fin. The two fins can be folded out when needed, allowing for even more stable, and therefore energy-efficient, “sailing” on the wind.
In addition, the students developed a new solar panel with an efficiency of more than 27 per cent, in collaboration with the company LONGi. That way, the panel can extract more energy from the sunlight. Traditional rooftop solar panels have an efficiency of 16 to 20 per cent.
The race starts on 24 August in Darwin in northern Australia, and takes participants as far south as Adelaide. The course is 3,021 km long.
#FlandersNewsService | The solar car of the Belgian Innoptus Solar Team during the the Sasol Solar Challenge in South Africa in 2024 © BELGA PHOTO RODGER BOSCH / AFP
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