Close partnership with students for sustainable mobility concepts

TDK works with students at various universities to develop sustainable mobility concepts for the future. As part of its sponsorship program, TDK is promoting concepts for the Hyperloop as well as for solar and electric vehicles. Components, know-how and also financial support are currently benefiting teams at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, Leuven University of Technology in Belgium and Aalen University of Applied Sciences in Germany. “We believe that promoting education, especially in the fields of technology and engineering, must be an important part of our mission as a company,” TDK says.

In the Hyperloop, small vehicles (pods) are sent through a vacuum tube at top speeds of up to 1,200 kilometers per hour. Elon Musk took up this idea again in 2013, founded the Hyperloop Pod Competition, and had an approximately 1.6-kilometer test track built for it in Hawthorne, California. Numerous teams from universities are taking part in the competition with their self-built pods, including the Swissloop team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Swissloop has already made it onto the podium of the competition twice and won the European Hyperloop Week (EHW) last year.

Among other things, TDK supplies the Swissloop pod with extremely compact DC link film capacitors for the inverter, which offer excellent electrical performance, as well as inductors for the required electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) compliance. However, the sponsorship package also includes a transparent foil that serves as a functional film for electromagnetic shielding.

The Swissloop team at ETH Zurich at the European Hyperloop Week 2021.

The Agoria Solar Team won the 2021 Solar Challenge Morocco with its BluePoint Atlas.

In the field of solar vehicles, TDK sponsors the Agoria Solar Team at the Technical University of Leuven in Belgium. The team has recently won the biggest and most important races and is the current world champion of the scene. The aim of the races is to cover the longest possible distances with the self-built vehicle using only solar energy. In doing so, the solar cars have to show their full potential in terms of power consumption and aerodynamics. Sensors and capacitors from TDK are among the components installed in the vehicle.

In the field of electromobility, TDK has for many years supported the E-Motion team at Aalen University, which is taking part in Formula Student, an international design competition involving more than 500 universities, with an electric car and a self-driving car. The competition is not only about the highest speed, but also about the best driving characteristics, the best design concept and the best business plan. Or, to put it in Formula Student's own words: “It's not only about going faster, it's about getting smarter!” TDK provides support here, above all with measurements for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC).

At the presentation of the vehicle for the season before Corona.