ANN ARBOR – While we’ve come to accept this as a fact, it pays to work towards eliminating the problems that EVs bring to the table. There are armies of scientists who work around the clock to improve the batteries’ power, life, and weight, but there are other areas that still need improving. One of them is battery charging, as even the fastest charging methods of today mean spending tens of minutes with the car hooked up to a charging pole.
Well, we can now confirm that fast charging is another area of interest for scientists around the world, and one team at the Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems within the Institute for Basic Science in Korea came up with some creative thinking that allows for a huge speed-up in charging. The new technology is called “quantum charging” and is based, as the name suggests, on quantum physics. It implies charging all cells in a battery simultaneously in a collective manner, not as one bigger cell as it happens in today’s electric vehicles.
This means that theoretically, the more cells a battery contains, the faster it can be charged. As an EV like Tesla Model 3 has thousands of them, this means the charging process can be thousands of times faster. It is not just faster charging, but a true quantum leap in fast charging. The implications are far-reaching and the technology can be used in many fields, not just electric vehicles. For instance, future fusion power plants will require large amounts of energy to be charged and discharged in an instant.
There is just one problem, though, as this new technology exists only on paper at the moment. Quantum technologies as a whole are still in their infancy, so it might take a while before we would see this implemented at a charging station nearby. Nevertheless, even though it sounds like a phantasy, it gives scientists a sense of direction and will no doubt incentivize agencies and businesses to invest in such technologies.
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