Siemens Digital Industries Software is sponsoring Team Sonnenwagen Aachen — a German student initiative focused on developing new sustainable mobility concepts — in the design and development process of the Sonnenwagen 3 solar racing car.

The Sonnenwagen team has used Siemens’ Teamcenter software to address their challenge of coordinating and optimising the interdependent areas of aerodynamics, mechanical and electrical systems, and vehicle structure — on a tight schedule.

By streamlining the exchange between NX software and Simcenter software — including Simcenter STAR-CCM+ software and Simcenter Amesim software — Teamcenter allows Sonnenwagen to exchange design models across applications more easily and efficiently.

The team says designing a solar car like the Sonnenwagen 3 requires it to handle many different parts that need to be integrated into the main assembly, and that by using Teamcenter as a data management tool, it has been able to ‘accelerate iteration loops’ and design a better Sonnenwagen 3.

Simon Quinker, Team Sonnenwagen’s vice chairman and head of marketing, said: “In past product development phases, we regularly ran into issues transferring models and data between different software solutions. This slows our designing process down and creates an additional need for planning and coordination.

“The pivotal point of our development came from Teamcenter. In addition to software, Siemens has been very supportive with its knowledge and expertise, to help us overcome hurdles and get the best out of the software.”

Naz Aydemir, an academic business development consultant for Siemens Digital Industries Software, said: “We are very pleased with the developments Sonnenwagen has been able to make by using Siemens’ software solutions as a whole. It was great to work closely with Sonnenwagen throughout the development process and help them to use the Siemens software product family to overcome many challenges.”