One of the most significant concerns that motorists have about switching to electric vehicles is that charging the vehicles takes an inordinately long time — if one can even find a working charger. These impediments to EV adoption have the academia, the authorities in different jurisdictions, and automakers concerned. Now NASA has revealed that the new technology it is developing for use in outer space can help cut EV charging time to just five minutes.
A team of researchers based at Purdue University used NASA dollars to design the Flow Boiling & Condensation Experiment (FBCE) to make it possible for fluids to flow in two phases while wicking away heat that is found inside the microgravity setting of the International Space Station.
This novel system of cooling is so effective that it could become the default way to provide cooling during future space missions. The researchers also assert that the technology can have plenty of use on Earth, such as making it easy and fast to recharge an electric vehicle’s battery. At the moment, it takes anywhere from 20 minutes (for fast chargers located on highways) to several hours (for the basic chargers typically installed in homes) to charge an EV battery from empty to full.
To make electric vehicles as user-friendly as cars running on fossil fuel, reducing charging time to five minutes or less has been the elusive target — until now. To show how difficult this target has been, estimates show that for an EV to be charged in a maximum of five minutes, its charging system should deliver at least 1,400 amperes of power. The fastest chargers on the market can only manage 520 amperes.
The Purdue team of researchers used a liquid coolant that isn’t electrically conductive, and they pumped it through the charging cable of an EV. By removing heat in this way, the researchers were able to deliver 2,400 amperes through the cable. This is a lot more than the 1,400 amperes required to achieve battery charging times that don’t exceed five minutes. This method of cooling allows the cable to carry nearly five times that amount of current that existing charging cables can safely carry without endangering the EV battery or charging system.
When this novel way to cool charging cables is commercialized, charging an electric vehicle will be as easy as pumping gasoline into the empty tank of a gas-powered car. The question is, how soon can this technology be made widely available at an affordable cost? Electric vehicle makers such as Lucid Motors (NASDAQ: LCID) are also searching for their own solutions to this charging speed dilemma.
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