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Fully Charged in Just 6 Minutes – Groundbreaking Technique Could Revolutionize EV Charging
(scitechdaily.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Technology
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I'm sick of reading phones and cars charging in a matter of minutes for the past decade.
Don't worry about it too much. These sorts of articles focus on battery tech, but the ultimate limiting factor is the ability of the plug to supply power.
A Tesla Model 3 has a 75kwh battery. Let's say it's at 20% charge. That's 60kwh to get it full (assuming 100% charge efficiency). It would take 600kw to charge that in 6 minutes.
The SAE J1772 plug is only rated to go up to 400kw on DC level 2, and you'd be hard pressed to find a charger that does it. I couldn't find info on Tesla's plug, but since it's about the same size, it's likely around the same. Tesla's superchargers are themselves only going up to 250kw.
It would take yet another plug standard, and chargers that can actually handle such a load. Oh, and upgrading the electrical network to handle such a beast in widespread use.
Most of which is pointless, anyway. EVs are best handled by giving them a little charge wherever they're parked. For road trips, unless you're the type to pee in a bottle and eat sandwiches you prepared ahead of time, about 300mi range with existing charge rates is sufficient.
Didn't think of this with this point of view
The main problem I have with that 300-mile range is in winter. 500 km of range in Canada would be enough for my purposes, but when winter hits and that range is massively decreased, it wouldn't quite be enough anymore. With winter being basically half the year here in Ontario, it's a huge downside.
That's calculated in.
After about 3 hours of driving, you're going to be ready for a break. At 70mph, that's 210 miles.
Batteries tend to charge quicker in the first 80% than the last 20%, and also don't charge quickly in the last 10%, so add an additional 30%.
Add another 20% for cold days. There are a few odd days of extremely cold weather where it'd be lower, but this is rare anywhere people actually live. Long range traveling on those days is also highly discouraged regardless of the type of car. Or even short range traveling, for that matter.
We do not need to hold back the rest of society just because a handful of people live in the arctic circle.
Add all that together, and you get to about 330 miles. This is enough to get you to 80% charge at each stop, likely within 30 minutes. Maybe even 20. Just right for a food and bathroom break that you're going to want, anyway.
If you think the number should be 4 hours of driving rather than 3, then 440 miles is the number to shoot for.
Current electric cars are about there already. Further battery advancement can go towards making the cars lighter and cheaper, not pushing range to unnecessary distance.
It's a matter of power delivery at the moment. A modern rapid charger you can add about 10 miles a minute so 10 minutes is normally fine.. barely enough time to have a cup of tea.
Getting power to a battery faster starts to become impractical simply because of the thickness of cable you'd need to do it, and the internal heat the battery would generate if you threw power at it that fast.
Think of it like a swimming pool. You can fill it with a small hose, might take an hour or two.. bigger hose, maybe down to 30 minutes.. you want it to be done in seconds? Sure.. let me just turn up with this dump truck full of water...
Most of the things you read are about as useful as potato batteries. 'We've come up with this new compound that can take charge really fast'. Sure. Now make millions of them, the size of a car, for a price people will pay. Oh you can't... there's the rub.
Turns out there are a near infinite ways of combining materials that make a battery, and only a handful that scale to industrial production.
I recently got a phone that charges at 65W, from empty to full in 30 minutes. It's at least getting better all the time, I'd say
That's not necessarily true, though it is also what I thought as of just a few days ago.
YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpqaQR4ikig
Piped Mirror:
https://piped.video/watch?v=UpqaQR4ikig
At least based on the information in this video from MKBHD, excessive heat is actually what causes rapid degradation of smartphone batteries. Super fast charging phones actually work by reducing the overall heat to the battery through engineering designs, such as by splitting the battery into two parts instead of having one entire battery that gets hot. In this way, a phone that supports 50W chargers can charge "each battery" at only 25W, instead of one single battery at 50W. The space between the batteries also insulates the heat between them. It's simple but ingenious really.
You do have a tradeoff of less battery power overall, due to the gap between the batteries, but it is definitely a technical achievement.
I don't know how EV batteries work, but since the batteries are made up of many different smaller batteries, they could theoretically isolate the heat much more effectively than in a smartphone, which is all crammed into one battery in a tiny little space.
Try 3 decades
Well, you should stop reading because fast-charging is a thing now.