Written by / Zhang Ou
Editor/ Qian Yaguang
Design / Zhao Haoran
Source/ Detroit Free Press, by Phoebe Wall Howard
Ford Motor Company is working with scientists at Purdue University in Indiana to conduct a research plan that is expected to shorten the charging time of electric vehicles at charging stations from expected 25 minutes to 5 minutes.
"There is no doubt that this will be a landmark technological innovation." John McElroy, a longtime industry analyst at Autoline After Hours podcast host, said, "Once EV charging times become shorter, people will also be more receptive and there will be a larger potential EV market." ”
Liquid-cooled cables
Nerthuz/iStock▼
The person leading the study was Professor Issam Mudawar, a 66-year-old mechanical engineer from Beirut, Lebanon, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Mudawa has developed cutting-edge heat dissipation technology for giant jets and spacecraft and has been providing scientific solutions to the industry's toughest technical challenges for several years.
Now, he is studying how to reduce battery charging time and improve charging efficiency in the field of pure electric vehicles. It's a physics lesson that applies what you've learned to the real world.
In 2021, when the entire project is still in its early stages, Professor Mudawa predicts that this electric vehicle charging technology will take 2 years to complete. His team is working around the clock to achieve this goal by 2023.
But in a recent interview with the Detroit Free, he told reporters that the technology may be realized sooner than expected, and final tests are already underway for special charging cables.
It's a not-so-mundane cable with magical powers.
In fact, because batteries overheat when they charge too fast, automakers have been struggling to figure out ways to cool the process, which is also more efficient than redesigning batteries from scratch.
Michael Degner, senior technical director at Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, said in a November 2021 Ford press release: "Today, there is a certain limit to the speed at which electric vehicle batteries can be charged due to the danger of overheating. To charge faster, you need to increase the current, and the greater the current, the more heat accumulates when the cable is running. ”
The secret of the core technology
Professor Sam Mudawa
Professor Mudawa has spent nearly 40 years at Purdue researching ways to cool electronics more efficiently.
According to Mudawa, Purdue's lab has developed a solution that can solve this headache for many people, and the heat generated by electronic products is too large to be treated with existing technology.
In an November 2021 press release, Purdue said Professor Mudawa and his team designed a cable that utilizes a liquid-cooled method to deliver 4.6 times more current than the fastest electric vehicle charger currently on the market, and that the charging process will emit 24.22 kilowatts of heat, a project funded by Ford and Purdue University's Research and Development Alliance.
This new cable is cooled with liquid, which then turns into steam. This element for evaporating liquids is revolutionary, and cooling with liquids also keeps cables relatively lighter and thinner.
To reduce the charging time of an electric vehicle to 5 minutes, a minimum current of 1400 amperes is required. According to a Purdue press release, Professor Mudawa and his students have demonstrated in the lab that their cable can withstand more than 2400 amperes of current. For reference, the industry's most advanced chargers can only deliver up to 520 amps, while most chargers available to consumers support less than 150 amps.
Eliminate "charging anxiety"
When driving electric vehicles, people often express concerns about the distance that the battery can travel, which is often referred to as "range anxiety", and in the early days of the development of electric vehicles, endurance has always been one of the most worrying issues.
With the popularity of electric vehicles, charging time has developed into a new anxiety, which is often called "charging anxiety". If we're enjoying a fun road trip and have to stop halfway through to drive an electric car and spend 30 minutes or more charging, that's a disappointment.
This new technology is precisely to solve this problem. At its core is a charging cable, which is now being tested in the lab. In the coming months, Professor Mudawa will study the charging speeds of various electric vehicles and bring products to market as quickly as possible.
While Tesla-led automakers — including General Motors, Ford Andeur and Volkswagen — have launched a number of pure electric vehicles on the market so far, public charging stations are expected to surge in the United States along with investment in infrastructure facilities in the United States and the introduction of electric versions of Americans' favorite pickup trucks.
Ford will deliver the all-electric F-150 Lightning to customers in the spring of 2022, and GM also plans to deliver its all-electric Silverado in the fall of 2023, which will greatly increase the number of pure electric vehicles on the road.
It is closely related to life
Computer engineer Jim Buczkowski, a senior fellow in the joint R&D project and the current head of Ford's research team, has spent 40 years at Ford developing electronics and software, including the birth of the F-150 Lightning.
He said that under ceo Jim Farley, Ford is now on a special, exciting journey. Jim Farley has publicly pledged to go all out for the transition to electrification, investing billions of dollars in his first year in office.
When talking about this new technology research, Butzkovsky also said that the challenge of fast charging is by no means an exaggeration, it is closely related to our daily lives.
"Charging forces people to pause while an electric car is on the move," he said. Imagine this: the first scenario is that you can charge 1 minute and then travel 200 kilometers; the second case is that your car has a range of 800 kilometers, but you need to stop and spend three or four hours or even 10 hours charging. How would you choose? When we drive a fuel car, we can drive nearly 700 kilometers after refueling for 2-3 minutes. Therefore, the cost of time on the road is crucial. ”
Another problem is that even if the charge is displayed in real time on the dashboard screen like an oil gauge, the charging demand is unpredictable because the battery's power consumption is not linear, it is also affected by speed, weather and terrain.
"What people care about is not how big the capacity of the battery is. They just want to be able to recharge their batteries faster and get back on the road. What we're doing now is trying to get electricity into the vehicle faster. "Getting energy from the grid into the battery faster is a top priority, and transferring energy means generating heat." ”
How energy works
He went on to explain the principle of fuel vehicle refueling. Fuel contains a certain amount of energy, when the fuel is ignited, the stored energy will be released, the released energy to power the vehicle, fuel the tank is to inject energy into it.
"And the electricity of electric cars is different. Electricity is taken from the grid, stored in power batteries, and used to drive the motors that power the vehicle. ”
Fuel vehicles run on energy stored in fuel liquids, while pure electric vehicles operate on energy that is transferred and stored in batteries.
"When you connect a plug to a vehicle, you're actually transferring energy from the grid to the vehicle via cable." Butzkowski said.
"If the tank is filled with liquid fuel, there is no loss of energy when the energy is transferred to the tank." "And when you transfer energy from the grid to the battery, some of that energy is converted into heat and lost in the process," he said. The more and faster you transfer energy to the battery, the more heat you generate in the cable used to transfer energy. ”
In this case, the electrification of the car requires a different way of thinking. That's why many engineers spend a lot of time trying to reduce the weight of their vehicles in order to use less energy.
The necessity of battery cooling
"In general, after driving nearly 500 kilometers, electric vehicles need to be charged. It takes at least 20 minutes or more to charge the car to the charging station, which is very frustrating. "That's why our technology is able to solve a large part of the problem." Reduce time and make it easier to manage. If the charging time only takes 5 minutes, you can achieve the same efficiency as refueling at the gas station. ”
At a time when companies around the world are working to improve batteries, the Ford-Purdue Alliance is more focused on battery cooling.
"The cables we usually use when providing current, including home wires, like mobile phone charging, computer charging, they emit limited heat, and they feel very warm to touch. And these are small batteries. Professor Mudawa explained.
"If it's a simple product application, there's nothing wrong with the heat. But if it's a huge current from the wire to the conductor, then the problem arises. The surrounding insulation may be melted, and if some heat is not dissipated, a fire or even something more serious will happen. ”
Professor Mudawa is well-known in this field, and his expertise is in transferring large amounts of heat and energy out of tiny spaces. He works closely with NASA on space technology, for example, dissipating huge amounts of heat for its large data centers to keep the system from overheating and preventing equipment from burning.
Bring it to market
Professor Mudawa is currently in talks with a number of companies with the goal of building large-scale high-tech facilities funded by automakers, investors and governments to test batteries, charging devices and accelerate the process of bringing new technologies to market.
Professor Mudawa said: "Charging companies have been proactively approaching for weeks. But a lot of companies don't like to disclose what they're working on, so there's not much information available. In fact, solutions can only be arrived at fairly quickly if the technical know-how is fused with science and physics in universities. ”
Subsequently, it will take time to finalize legal, patent application, licensing and intellectual property issues.
In a Ford press release, Ted Miller, manager of ford's electrification subsystems and power research division, said ford has more than 2,500 U.S. patents for electrification technology and more than 4,000 patents pending.
A challenging journey
Tom McCarthy, director of energy, propulsion and sustainability at Ford's Research and Advanced Engineering Division, believes the automotive industry is pushing performance limits and thermal management is becoming more challenging as it moves toward electrification.
"If we can overcome the heat transfer problem, we can get faster charging speeds," he said. It's a kind of industry self-challenge: what technological breakthroughs can take us to the next level? It's also a positive, exciting journey to discover possibilities, to find answers, to do things that no one has ever done before. ”