Ford working on 5 Minute charging with Purdue University

RedStallion

Banned
Banned
Joined
Mar 9, 2021
Threads
50
Messages
1,394
Reaction score
1,763
Location
People's Republic of California
Vehicles
Mach-E, et al
Country flag
FORD AND PURDUE PATENT CHARGING STATION CABLE FOR RESEARCH THAT COULD LEAD TO RECHARGING EVS AS QUICKLY AS GAS STATION FILL-UPS
Nov 10, 2021 | DEARBORN, Mich.
1636549039454.jpg


  • Ford researchers have successfully completed an early step with Purdue University inventing a new, patent-pending method for charging stations that could one day deliver significantly more power compared to today’s leading systems
  • Using liquid as an active cooling agent, the concept uniquely changes the liquid to vapor, and could combine with in-development vehicle charging technology to lower the average time to recharge electric vehicles
  • This comes as Ford invests to lead the electric revolution and help the world transition to electric vehicles by pushing their mainstream adoption with vehicles such as the Mustang Mach-E SUV and soon-to-arrive F-150 Lightning™ Pickup and E-Transit Van
DEARBORN, Mich., Nov. 10, 2021 – Ford and Purdue University researchers have taken an important early step to make recharging EVs simple and time saving.

Through a research alliance, researchers from both groups are working to develop a new, patent-pending charging station cable that could combine with in-development vehicle charging technology, making it even easier for people to transition to EVs with seamless re-charging.

“Today, chargers are limited in how quickly they can charge an EV’s battery due to the danger of overheating. Charging faster requires more current to travel through the charging cable,” said Michael Degner, senior technical leader, Ford Research and Advanced Engineering.1 “The higher the current, the greater the amount of heat that has to be removed to keep the cable operational.”

Purdue researchers are focusing on an alternative cooling method by designing a charging cable that can deliver an increased current. The cable uses liquid as an active cooling agent, which can help extract more heat from the cable by changing phase from liquid to vapor – the key difference between this and current liquid-cooled technology on the market.

This innovation could one day deliver significantly more power than today’s leading systems to re-charge electric vehicles, making the potential of faster re-charging times possible if vehicle charging and other technology enhancements are made in parallel. Ultimately, this could eventually lead to re-charging EVs as quickly as conventional gas station fill-ups.

The idea for this technology originated based on the Ford team’s understanding of the challenges faced going to faster charging rates, as well as Purdue researchers’ area of expertise. The teams collaborate regularly to review the latest results and give feedback on areas of focus as the technology is developed.

“Electric vehicle charging time can vary widely, from 20 minutes at a station to hours on an at-home charging station, and that can be a source of anxiety for people who are considering buying an electric vehicle,” said Issam Mudawar, Betty Ruth and Milton B. Hollander Family professor of mechanical engineering, Purdue University. “My lab has come up with a solution for situations where the amounts of heat that are produced are beyond the capabilities of today’s technologies.”

Mudawar says his lab intends to begin testing a prototype charging cable in the next two years to determine more specific charge speeds for certain models of electric vehicles.

“Ford is committed to making the transition to electrification easy,” said Degner. “We are glad to work closely with Purdue’s research team, which has the potential to make electric vehicle and commercial fleet ownership even more appealing and accessible.”

Electrifying young talent
The alliance with Ford and Purdue is part of hundreds of strategic alliances the company has with university professors around the world. Providing graduate students with opportunities to work on real world-challenges helps them develop their skills while introducing Ford to students who may choose to start their career at the company.

“The research that we are conducting in a project such as this is really advanced, and we view it as a benefit for us, the future of charging electric vehicles and as a pipeline to young talent – and we’ve seen success in doing this,” said Ted Miller, Ford’s manager of Electrification Subsystems and Power Supply Research. “Students get engaged, they like the work they’re doing, and it’s a sustained investment in their laboratories, while helping us solve problems.”
While the fast-charging cable won’t be on the market for some time as research continues, Mudawar has been developing ways to more efficiently cool electronics for the past 37 years by taking advantage of how liquid captures heat when boiled into a vapor.

“Ford has been actively involved in battery research and electric vehicles dating back to the days of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison,” Miller said. “We’ve secured more than 2,500 U.S. patents in electrification technologies and we have more than 4,000 more pending. Working with Professor Mudawar and his students is the perfect fit to help us research the charging solutions of the future.”

To see more on Purdue’s research, click here.

# # #
1The charging rate decreases as battery reaches full capacity. Your results may vary based on peak charging times, battery state of charge, lithium-ion battery age and state of health.

Purdue-research-image-2.JPG
Has anybody suggested using silver cables yet? That would be a good project. ?
 

dtbaker61

Well-Known Member
First Name
Dan
Joined
May 11, 2020
Threads
104
Messages
4,012
Reaction score
3,690
Location
santa fe,nm
Website
www.envirokarma.org
Vehicles
MME (delivered 2/26/21), DIY eMiata BEV
Occupation
Solar Sales/install
Country flag
Tesla Superchargers typically have a short, high-mounted cable simply to keep it from dropping onto the ground. Larger stations have one or two stalls that have a longer cable and plenty of surrounding space for handicapped access and special vehicles.

I don't have the engineering data, but their liquid cooling seems more than sufficient for continuous 250 kW charging. It wouldn't be a big engineering effort to use a longer cable, especially since a significant part of the heat is generated at the connector contacts.
cooling the cable is not going to help if the battery cells heat up for form dendrites under extended high current.....

It's going to take new tech in batteries, like solid state, to increase current during discharge and charge without damage.
 

ab13

Well-Known Member
Joined
Feb 17, 2020
Threads
3
Messages
584
Reaction score
469
Location
California
Vehicles
Rav4 Hybrid
Country flag
Tesla Superchargers typically have a short, high-mounted cable simply to keep it from dropping onto the ground. Larger stations have one or two stalls that have a longer cable and plenty of surrounding space for handicapped access and special vehicles.

I don't have the engineering data, but their liquid cooling seems more than sufficient for continuous 250 kW charging. It wouldn't be a big engineering effort to use a longer cable, especially since a significant part of the heat is generated at the connector contacts.
I would expect the longer cables to have slower charging as they heat up. I've seen people post saying some users put wet towels over the handle and cables to help cool for higher charging. At 250 kW and 480 V, the current is 520 amps. A CCS at 350 kW at 850 V (though I think it uses higher voltage) is 411 amps. Much lower current. That is why everyone is moving to 800/900 volt systems.

Using a cooling method as proposed (evaporative two phase), the temperature of a system can be held to a mostly constant temperature.
 

TheCats

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 18, 2021
Threads
0
Messages
95
Reaction score
77
Location
95033
Vehicles
Y5Z
Country flag
I would expect the longer cables to have slower charging as they heat up. I've seen people post saying some users put wet towels over the handle and cables to help cool for higher charging. At 250 kW and 480 V, the current is 520 amps. A CCS at 350 kW at 850 V (though I think it uses higher voltage) is 411 amps. Much lower current. That is why everyone is moving to 800/900 volt systems.

Using a cooling method as proposed (evaporative two phase), the temperature of a system can be held to a mostly constant temperature.
A longer cable probably isn't going to heat up significantly more than the short cable. Liquid cooling is very effective, even without a phase transition.

Note that a warm cable alone won't slow the charging since the temperature sensor is in the connector, not along the bulk cable.
 

Zoom-Zoom

Member
Joined
Jan 4, 2022
Threads
1
Messages
8
Reaction score
13
Location
Michigan
Vehicles
2021 Mach E 4
Country flag
5-minute electric vehicle charging could be here soon, professor says
Phoebe Wall Howard

Detroit Free Press

Ford Motor Co. is working with scientists at Purdue University in Indiana on a patent-pending plan to slash the average time it takes to recharge all-electric vehicles at charging stations from an estimated 25 minutes to 5 minutes.

"That's a game changer," said longtime industry analyst John McElroy, host of "Autoline After Hours" podcast and webcast. "All of a sudden, it makes electrics far more viable for everyday use for people. It opens up the potential EV market."

The man leading the effort, a mechanical engineer, has developed cutting-edge technology used in jumbo jets and spaceships.

Now he's applying that intelligence to all-electric cars — and how to reduce the time it takes to recharge batteries so people don't feel anxious about watching their vehicle run low. This is a physics class that applies learnings to the real world.

Professor Issam Mudawar, 66, a Beirut, Lebanon, native who came to the United States to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spent nearly four decades developing scientific solutions to industry's trickiest challenges.

He initially predicted a two-year window until the electric vehicle charging technology comes to market. His team is working around the clock to make it happen by 2023.

But he told the Free Press in an interview it could happen even sooner than his forecast.

Mudawar is in the final test stages for a special charging cable.

That's it. A cable.

But what it does is magical.

Knowing that batteries can overheat when charged too quickly, automakers have been trying to figure out a way to cool down the process.

Rather than redesign the battery, work instead to cool the process down.

“Today, chargers are limited in how quickly they can charge an EV’s battery due to the danger of overheating. Charging faster requires more current to travel through the charging cable,” Michael Degner, senior technical leader, Ford Research and Advanced Engineering 1, said in November in a Ford news release. “The higher the current, the greater the amount of heat that has to be removed to keep the cable operational.”

That charging cable that plugs into an electric car resembles the hose you see at the gas station pump. The thing that transmits fuel — or energy.

But this new cable design from Purdue uses liquid to cool the cable, then turns the liquid to vapor.

This vapor element is revolutionary.

The secret
Mudawar has spent nearly four decades at Purdue developing ways to more efficiently cool electronics.

The lab in Purdue has come up with a solution to a scenario that has paralyzed the industry — where too much heat is produced to manage with available technology, Mudawar said.

Using an alternative cooling method, he and his team have designed a cable that can deliver a current 4.6 times that of the fastest available EV chargers on the market today by removing up to 24.22 kilowatts of heat, Purdue said in a news release in November. The project was funded by a research and development alliance between Ford and Purdue.

Another reason for faster charging is because the need to charge is not predictable even though it's tracked on the dashboard screen like a fuel gauge. Battery charge is affected by speed, weather and topography.

Mudawar, by the way, decided against pursuing a career in oil painting to dedicate his life to science.

Addressing 'range anxiety'
Worry about distance a car can drive on a battery is often called "range anxiety," and this new technology addresses that issue. But that's not even the best part.

"People have said that range anxiety is one of the big things. But no, no, charge time is the new range anxiety," McElroy, of "Autoline," said. "People think, OK, I can live with an electric car but I don't want to be stopping for 30-45 minutes to charge if I'm on a road trip."

Moving quickly
A prototype of this new technology, this charging cable, is being tested in the lab now. In coming months, Mudawar will study the speed of charge on various electric vehicles and move as quickly as possible to get the product to market.

While automakers led by Tesla — including GM, Ford and Volkswagen — have battery electric vehicles on the market currently, public use of charging stations is expected to surge in the U.S. with the introduction of bestselling pickup trucks.

Ford delivers to customers its all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning in spring 2022 and General Motors is scheduled to deliver its all-electric Silverado in fall 2023, which will significantly increase the number of all-electric vehicles on the road.

'Would you care?'
Computer engineer Jim Buczkowski, a senior technical fellow and current leader of Ford's research team, has been involved in the evolution of electronics and software for four decades at Ford including the F-150 Lightning. He said now is an especially "exciting time" under Ford CEO Jim Farley, who has committed publicly to going all-in on electric vehicles — committing billions of dollars during his first year running the company.

The faster-charging challenge can't be overstated, Buczkowski told the Free Press.

"It's the time that's used to put energy back into the vehicle so you can continue driving," he said. "Would you care if you had 125 mile range if you could get another 125 miles in one minute? But if it takes you 3, 4, 10 hours to give you 500 miles of range, that's where the problem is. It's the time element. You can put a hose up and get 20 gallons in 2 to 3 minutes."

Getting the energy from the electrical grid into the battery faster is top priority.

"Do people really want bigger batteries or more batteries or do they just want to refill the energy so they can get distance, mileage and range faster? At Purdue, we're working to get the energy into the vehicle faster. And transferring that amount of energy can create a lot of heat," said Buczkowski.

Tiny units of energy

When you think about fuel and gasoline, the liquid contains an amount of energy per gallon of gasoline, he explained. The energy is stored in the liquid. When the fuel is ignited and combusts, the stored energy is released. The released energy is doing the work that powers the vehicle.

Filling a gas tank is filling it with energy.

"Electricity in EVs is different," Buczkowski said. "You're taking electrical energy from the grid and storing it in a battery to be reused to power a motor that powers the vehicle."

In one case, you're taking the energy already stored in a chemical and combusting it to release the energy. In the other case, you're taking the energy of electricity and moving it to the battery to store it. Energy in the fuel is already stored in the liquid.

A battery electric vehicle is operating off energy you transfer and store in the battery.

"When you connect the plug to the vehicle, you’re actually moving the energy from the grid into the vehicle through the wires," Buczkowski said.

"When you fill your tank with liquid fuel, none of the energy is lost when you're transferring it to the tank," he said. "When you transfer energy to a battery, some of it is lost as heat in the wires as you transfer it. The more and faster you transfer the energy to the battery, the more heat you create in the wire you’re using to transfer it."

Electrifying cars requires a different way of thinking.

Engineers spend a lot of time trying to reduce vehicle weight so it uses less energy.

After about 300 miles or so, in general, people will need to recharge, Mudawar said. If there's no charging station, a driver ends up on the side of the road. Like running out of gas in cars that aren't electric.

'Very frustrating'
"When people go to the charging station, it takes them well over 20 minutes to charge the car. They're standing there waiting and waiting. The situation is very frustrating," Mudawar said. "This is where our technology is able to resolve a big part of the problem. Cut down the time to something more manageable. If you cut it down to 5 minutes, it becomes comparable to filling your car with gas."

Meanwhile, companies all over the world are trying to improve batteries. But this Ford-Purdue alliance focuses instead on battery cooling.

"When you supply electrical current through a wire, including the wires you have at home, there’s a finite amount of heat dissipated," Mudawar explained.

This applies to cellphones charging, computer cords charging. All feel warm to the touch. And those are small batteries.

"Heat is not a problem for simple applications," he said. "The problem comes when you have a huge amount of electric current and the amount coming out of the wire — the conductor — is enormous. Which means, you're going to melt the insulation around it and have a disaster on hand if you don't remove some of that heat. This is where we come in."

Working with NASA
His expertise is transferring large amounts of heat and energy from tiny spaces. Imagine large data centers that need to dissipate large amounts of heat to keep the systems from overheating.

"Another example would be aviation electronics, the brains of an aircraft," said Mudawar, who is also an aerospace engineer. "You have to dissipate large amounts of heat and safety is a major concern. Another is space systems. We work closely with NASA on space technologies where you have components dissipating large amounts of heat that has to be removed to prevent burning up devices."

Purdue and Ford have done the experimental work to validate the project.

The next step is bringing it to market.

Patents and licenses
Mudawar is presently in negotiations with multiple companies with a goal of setting up a massive high-tech facility funded by automakers, investors and the government to test batteries, charging equipment. That would speed up the process.

Charging companies have been reaching out to Mudawar for weeks.

"The problem is, companies do not like to disclose what they're working on. Because of that, they're really shielding themselves from information available," he said. "When you blend technical know-how with more science and physics at a university, you can come up with solutions fairly quickly."

What's taking time, now, is finalizing legal, licensing and intellectual property issues.

Ford has more than 2,500 U.S. patents in electrification technologies and more than 4,000 more pending, Ted Miller, Ford’s manager of Electrification Subsystems and Power Supply Research, said in the Ford news release.

1,400 ampere?
It's worth noting that the prototype hasn’t been tested on electric vehicles yet.

However, Mudawar and his students have demonstrated in the lab that their cable accommodates a current of more than 2,400 amperes — where just a 1,400-ampere minimum would be needed to reduce charging times for large commercial electric vehicles to 5 minutes, Purdue said in its news release. The most advanced chargers in the industry deliver only currents up to 520 amperes, and most chargers available to consumers support currents of fewer than 150 amperes.

Breakthrough times
As the auto industry pushes performance limits in electrification, thermal management becomes more challenging, said Tom McCarthy, Ford director of Energy, Propulsion and Sustainability within Research and Advanced Engineering.

"If we can overcome the heat transfer problem, we can get a faster charge," he said. "It’s really kind of asking yourself, 'What are those technology breakthroughs that allow you to get to another level? ... This is just an exciting time to be in the industry. To find these kinds of insights and being able to do things that haven't really been done before."
 


ahg

Well-Known Member
First Name
Arthur
Joined
Oct 23, 2021
Threads
6
Messages
106
Reaction score
122
Location
Crofton, Maryland
Vehicles
2021 Mach E 4x 2014 Accord V6
Occupation
retired
Country flag
5-minute electric vehicle charging could be here soon, professor says
Phoebe Wall Howard

Detroit Free Press

Ford Motor Co. is working with scientists at Purdue University in Indiana on a patent-pending plan to slash the average time it takes to recharge all-electric vehicles at charging stations from an estimated 25 minutes to 5 minutes.

"That's a game changer," said longtime industry analyst John McElroy, host of "Autoline After Hours" podcast and webcast. "All of a sudden, it makes electrics far more viable for everyday use for people. It opens up the potential EV market."

The man leading the effort, a mechanical engineer, has developed cutting-edge technology used in jumbo jets and spaceships.

Now he's applying that intelligence to all-electric cars — and how to reduce the time it takes to recharge batteries so people don't feel anxious about watching their vehicle run low. This is a physics class that applies learnings to the real world.

Professor Issam Mudawar, 66, a Beirut, Lebanon, native who came to the United States to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spent nearly four decades developing scientific solutions to industry's trickiest challenges.

He initially predicted a two-year window until the electric vehicle charging technology comes to market. His team is working around the clock to make it happen by 2023.

But he told the Free Press in an interview it could happen even sooner than his forecast.

Mudawar is in the final test stages for a special charging cable.

That's it. A cable.

But what it does is magical.

Knowing that batteries can overheat when charged too quickly, automakers have been trying to figure out a way to cool down the process.

Rather than redesign the battery, work instead to cool the process down.

“Today, chargers are limited in how quickly they can charge an EV’s battery due to the danger of overheating. Charging faster requires more current to travel through the charging cable,” Michael Degner, senior technical leader, Ford Research and Advanced Engineering 1, said in November in a Ford news release. “The higher the current, the greater the amount of heat that has to be removed to keep the cable operational.”

That charging cable that plugs into an electric car resembles the hose you see at the gas station pump. The thing that transmits fuel — or energy.

But this new cable design from Purdue uses liquid to cool the cable, then turns the liquid to vapor.

This vapor element is revolutionary.

The secret
Mudawar has spent nearly four decades at Purdue developing ways to more efficiently cool electronics.

The lab in Purdue has come up with a solution to a scenario that has paralyzed the industry — where too much heat is produced to manage with available technology, Mudawar said.

Using an alternative cooling method, he and his team have designed a cable that can deliver a current 4.6 times that of the fastest available EV chargers on the market today by removing up to 24.22 kilowatts of heat, Purdue said in a news release in November. The project was funded by a research and development alliance between Ford and Purdue.

Another reason for faster charging is because the need to charge is not predictable even though it's tracked on the dashboard screen like a fuel gauge. Battery charge is affected by speed, weather and topography.

Mudawar, by the way, decided against pursuing a career in oil painting to dedicate his life to science.

Addressing 'range anxiety'
Worry about distance a car can drive on a battery is often called "range anxiety," and this new technology addresses that issue. But that's not even the best part.

"People have said that range anxiety is one of the big things. But no, no, charge time is the new range anxiety," McElroy, of "Autoline," said. "People think, OK, I can live with an electric car but I don't want to be stopping for 30-45 minutes to charge if I'm on a road trip."

Moving quickly
A prototype of this new technology, this charging cable, is being tested in the lab now. In coming months, Mudawar will study the speed of charge on various electric vehicles and move as quickly as possible to get the product to market.

While automakers led by Tesla — including GM, Ford and Volkswagen — have battery electric vehicles on the market currently, public use of charging stations is expected to surge in the U.S. with the introduction of bestselling pickup trucks.

Ford delivers to customers its all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning in spring 2022 and General Motors is scheduled to deliver its all-electric Silverado in fall 2023, which will significantly increase the number of all-electric vehicles on the road.

'Would you care?'
Computer engineer Jim Buczkowski, a senior technical fellow and current leader of Ford's research team, has been involved in the evolution of electronics and software for four decades at Ford including the F-150 Lightning. He said now is an especially "exciting time" under Ford CEO Jim Farley, who has committed publicly to going all-in on electric vehicles — committing billions of dollars during his first year running the company.

The faster-charging challenge can't be overstated, Buczkowski told the Free Press.

"It's the time that's used to put energy back into the vehicle so you can continue driving," he said. "Would you care if you had 125 mile range if you could get another 125 miles in one minute? But if it takes you 3, 4, 10 hours to give you 500 miles of range, that's where the problem is. It's the time element. You can put a hose up and get 20 gallons in 2 to 3 minutes."

Getting the energy from the electrical grid into the battery faster is top priority.

"Do people really want bigger batteries or more batteries or do they just want to refill the energy so they can get distance, mileage and range faster? At Purdue, we're working to get the energy into the vehicle faster. And transferring that amount of energy can create a lot of heat," said Buczkowski.

Tiny units of energy

When you think about fuel and gasoline, the liquid contains an amount of energy per gallon of gasoline, he explained. The energy is stored in the liquid. When the fuel is ignited and combusts, the stored energy is released. The released energy is doing the work that powers the vehicle.

Filling a gas tank is filling it with energy.

"Electricity in EVs is different," Buczkowski said. "You're taking electrical energy from the grid and storing it in a battery to be reused to power a motor that powers the vehicle."

In one case, you're taking the energy already stored in a chemical and combusting it to release the energy. In the other case, you're taking the energy of electricity and moving it to the battery to store it. Energy in the fuel is already stored in the liquid.

A battery electric vehicle is operating off energy you transfer and store in the battery.

"When you connect the plug to the vehicle, you’re actually moving the energy from the grid into the vehicle through the wires," Buczkowski said.

"When you fill your tank with liquid fuel, none of the energy is lost when you're transferring it to the tank," he said. "When you transfer energy to a battery, some of it is lost as heat in the wires as you transfer it. The more and faster you transfer the energy to the battery, the more heat you create in the wire you’re using to transfer it."

Electrifying cars requires a different way of thinking.

Engineers spend a lot of time trying to reduce vehicle weight so it uses less energy.

After about 300 miles or so, in general, people will need to recharge, Mudawar said. If there's no charging station, a driver ends up on the side of the road. Like running out of gas in cars that aren't electric.

'Very frustrating'
"When people go to the charging station, it takes them well over 20 minutes to charge the car. They're standing there waiting and waiting. The situation is very frustrating," Mudawar said. "This is where our technology is able to resolve a big part of the problem. Cut down the time to something more manageable. If you cut it down to 5 minutes, it becomes comparable to filling your car with gas."

Meanwhile, companies all over the world are trying to improve batteries. But this Ford-Purdue alliance focuses instead on battery cooling.

"When you supply electrical current through a wire, including the wires you have at home, there’s a finite amount of heat dissipated," Mudawar explained.

This applies to cellphones charging, computer cords charging. All feel warm to the touch. And those are small batteries.

"Heat is not a problem for simple applications," he said. "The problem comes when you have a huge amount of electric current and the amount coming out of the wire — the conductor — is enormous. Which means, you're going to melt the insulation around it and have a disaster on hand if you don't remove some of that heat. This is where we come in."

Working with NASA
His expertise is transferring large amounts of heat and energy from tiny spaces. Imagine large data centers that need to dissipate large amounts of heat to keep the systems from overheating.

"Another example would be aviation electronics, the brains of an aircraft," said Mudawar, who is also an aerospace engineer. "You have to dissipate large amounts of heat and safety is a major concern. Another is space systems. We work closely with NASA on space technologies where you have components dissipating large amounts of heat that has to be removed to prevent burning up devices."

Purdue and Ford have done the experimental work to validate the project.

The next step is bringing it to market.

Patents and licenses
Mudawar is presently in negotiations with multiple companies with a goal of setting up a massive high-tech facility funded by automakers, investors and the government to test batteries, charging equipment. That would speed up the process.

Charging companies have been reaching out to Mudawar for weeks.

"The problem is, companies do not like to disclose what they're working on. Because of that, they're really shielding themselves from information available," he said. "When you blend technical know-how with more science and physics at a university, you can come up with solutions fairly quickly."

What's taking time, now, is finalizing legal, licensing and intellectual property issues.

Ford has more than 2,500 U.S. patents in electrification technologies and more than 4,000 more pending, Ted Miller, Ford’s manager of Electrification Subsystems and Power Supply Research, said in the Ford news release.

1,400 ampere?
It's worth noting that the prototype hasn’t been tested on electric vehicles yet.

However, Mudawar and his students have demonstrated in the lab that their cable accommodates a current of more than 2,400 amperes — where just a 1,400-ampere minimum would be needed to reduce charging times for large commercial electric vehicles to 5 minutes, Purdue said in its news release. The most advanced chargers in the industry deliver only currents up to 520 amperes, and most chargers available to consumers support currents of fewer than 150 amperes.

Breakthrough times
As the auto industry pushes performance limits in electrification, thermal management becomes more challenging, said Tom McCarthy, Ford director of Energy, Propulsion and Sustainability within Research and Advanced Engineering.

"If we can overcome the heat transfer problem, we can get a faster charge," he said. "It’s really kind of asking yourself, 'What are those technology breakthroughs that allow you to get to another level? ... This is just an exciting time to be in the industry. To find these kinds of insights and being able to do things that haven't really been done before."
What about the wiring in the car? And the battery itself?
 

nvabill

Well-Known Member
First Name
Bill
Joined
Jan 11, 2021
Threads
49
Messages
1,944
Reaction score
1,547
Location
Virginia Beach, Va.
Vehicles
F-150, '22 California Route 1
Country flag
Yep, working on, kinda like being a little bit pregnant! :D
 

Ride_the_lightning

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 11, 2021
Threads
6
Messages
546
Reaction score
1,070
Location
Midwest
Vehicles
Mach E Premium SR AWD
Occupation
Engineer
Country flag
This is one part of a complex puzzle. 5 minute charging means roughly 1000kw chargers. That’s a shit ton of power. We can’t even pull that for battery electric buses yet, and they don’t even use cables, they use overhead pantographs (although 600kw is in the works for pantograph charging). Bus batteries are also over 400kwh and charge at 800V.

1000kw charging, over a cable, for a car battery that’s less than 100kwh, using todays lithium ion batteries, is not happening anytime soon (although I’d like it to as much as everyone else).

Edit: if we are talking 5 minutes to charge from 20-80%, that’s still a charge rate of over 700kw for the MME extended range. We can’t even hit 150kw sustained yet, and it’s not because of the cable.
 
Last edited:

Mawby

Well-Known Member
First Name
Markus
Joined
Dec 4, 2021
Threads
3
Messages
316
Reaction score
129
Location
Central California
Vehicles
1933 Ford Speedstar Roadster, 2021 Mache CA RT1
Occupation
Business Owner
Country flag
This is one part of a complex puzzle. 5 minute charging means roughly 1000kw chargers. That’s a shit ton of power. We can’t even pull that for battery electric buses yet, and they don’t even use cables, they use overhead pantographs (although 600kw is in the works for pantograph charging). Bus batteries are also over 400kwh and charge at 800V.

1000kw charging, over a cable, for a car battery that’s less than 100kwh, using todays lithium ion batteries, is not happening anytime soon (although I’d like it to as much as everyone else).

Edit: if we are talking 5 minutes to charge from 20-80%, that’s still a charge rate of over 700kw for the MME extended range. We can’t even hit 150kw sustained yet, and it’s not because of the cable.
I thought that was the point. Due to heat, the charge rate drops.
 

dbsb3233

Well-Known Member
First Name
TimCO
Joined
Dec 30, 2019
Threads
54
Messages
9,357
Reaction score
10,903
Location
Colorado, USA
Vehicles
2021 Mustang Mach-E FE, 2023 Bronco Sport OB
Occupation
Retired
Country flag
What about the wiring in the car? And the battery itself?
Exactly. This may make the charge cable handle more, but how is it supposed to it improve the battery pack so it doesn't overheat? It never says a thing about that.

90% of the article was about "why" rather than "how". We all know why people want faster charging. That's part's a duh.
 
Last edited:

phidauex

Well-Known Member
First Name
Sam
Joined
Dec 8, 2020
Threads
16
Messages
847
Reaction score
1,570
Location
Colorado
Vehicles
2021 MachE 4EX, 2006 Prius, 1997 Tacoma
Occupation
Renewable Energy Engineer
Country flag
It is a cool innovation, using phase change materials in a charging cable. But unfortunately the cable connecting to the car is one of 7 or 8 critical pieces of equipment needed for a car to charge at 1400A, so fixing it is nice, but won’t fundamentally change things until all the other parts come along. The battery itself is the hardest problem to solve - long lasting battery chemistries are just not compatible with 10C+ charge rates right now. All the other components are currently doable with existing technology just by throwing more money at it.
Sponsored

 
 




Top