Battery Pack Design for Surya
As Battery Lead and Engineering Director, I lead the design and manufacturing of the solar car’s 120V, 5.25kWh battery pack alongside members of my battery team. I personally modelled portions of the pack’s components, reviewed every component’s design before release to manufacturing, and worked hands-on alongside the battery team through fabrication and cell-testing.
Getting Started
As the development of the pack progressed, so to did our design ideas (as well as the regulations we had to design around). This lead to our preliminary design taking many twists and turns along the way.
In the Autumn of 2025 we were convinced that our modules were going to end up triangular to allow for more control over the form factor of the pack within the vehicle. This design was later scrapped in favor of rectangular modules .
Design Refinement and Iteration
Using the rules of the American Solar Challenge as our guidebook, the battery team started by identifying key requirements the pack would have to meet.
There were also a large number of requirements we generated by looking at how the battery would be integrated alongside the rest of the vehicle. One example would be determining the 120V max voltage for the pack based upon the efficiency curve of our motor controller.
Initial design also consisted of concept sketches so we could narrow down the design space before moving on to 3D modeling.
End Result
In the end, after many meetings with advisors at the Center for Automotive research (as well as many long hours spent in the shop), we reached the final battery pack that will be used next time we race.
The entire process taught me valuable lessons about the iterative design process as well as showcased first hand how the final design can be wildly different from what was originally planned (or even what you came up with during the process).
