“Illini Formula Electric (IFE) is the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s electric Formula SAE team. We design, build, and race electric formula cars. Every summer, our vehicle competes at the Formula SAE competition organized by SAE International. The team competes in a variety of static and dynamic events such as design, presentation, cost, acceleration, skidpad, autocross, endurance, and efficiency. “

Michael Stoens continues, “Over the past year, we have completely redesigned our vehicle to be at the forefront of innovation within the formula student competition. Our new vehicle features a 600V battery pack with a fully custom battery management system, an all-wheel drive implementation with AMK Motion quad inverters, and in-hub motors with custom planetary gearboxes. An array of sensors on the vehicle such as GPS and IMUs are used in combination with driver inputs such as throttle and steering position to calculate the torque allocation to each of the four wheels. Going forward, we plan to continue innovating by designing and building our own two-level silicon-carbide based inverter.” Illinois Solar Decathlon’s RENU-House should be hyphenated throughout the piece.

Michael has been part of the team since 2020 and is currently the Electrical Captain, meaning he manages the vehicle’s electrical design.