New quantum charging technology: a full electric car in as fast as 9 seconds?

Text | Academic headlines

With the popularity of electric vehicles, more and more consumers are beginning to worry about charging.

As far as the electric vehicles currently on the market are concerned, it takes about 10 hours for the charging pile to be fully charged at home. Even when heading to a dedicated fast charging station, it can take as soon as 20-40 minutes for a car to be fully charged. Obviously, the inconvenience of charging has also made many potential consumers hope that the tram will stop.

So, are there new technological breakthroughs to improve the charging speed of trams?

Recently, scientists at the Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems at the Institute of Basic Sciences (IBS) have come up with a completely new technical solution – quantum charging technology. Using quantum charging technology, the charging process for a traditional electric vehicle can be accelerated by a factor of 200, which means that the charging time will be reduced from 10 hours to about 3 minutes (at home), or from 30 minutes to 9 seconds at the charging station.

The heat and challenge of electric vehicles

Whether it is photovoltaic or nuclear energy, human civilization must sooner or later turn to renewable energy. Given humanity's growing energy needs and the limited nature of fossil fuels, this trend towards renewable energy is considered inevitable.

Therefore, in order to develop alternative energy sources, scientists have conducted a lot of research, most of which use electricity as the main energy carrier. With the widespread development of renewable energy, new products and equipment based on renewable energy have also developed rapidly. The most significant change is the rapid adoption of electric vehicles.

Although electric vehicles were barely visible on the road 10 years ago, millions of electric vehicles now enter thousands of homes every year. The electric vehicle market became one of the fastest-growing new energy industries, and Musk became one of the richest people in the world.

Unlike conventional cars, which derive energy from the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels, electric vehicles rely on batteries as storage medium for their energy. However, for a long time, the energy density of batteries was much lower than that of hydrocarbons, which led to very low range of early electric vehicles.

However, the gradual improvement of battery technology has finally brought the driving range of electric vehicles at an acceptable level compared to fuel vehicles. It is no exaggeration to say that improvements in battery storage technology are one of the major technical bottlenecks that must be addressed to drive the current electric vehicle revolution.

However, despite the huge advances in battery technology, today's EV consumers still face another problem – slow battery charging.

Quantum charging technology

To solve this problem, scientists began searching for answers in the mysterious field of quantum physics.

The researchers found that quantum technology could lead to new mechanisms for charging batteries at a faster rate. This concept of a "quantum battery" was first proposed in a seminal paper published in 2012.

Theoretically, quantum resources can be charged by charging the cells inside the battery collectively at the same time, thereby greatly speeding up the battery charging process. This finding is particularly exciting.

Later, around 2017, it was noted that there could be two possible ways to achieve this quantum advantage – namely "global operation" (all charging units are facing all other units at the same time, i.e. "all sitting at the same table") and 'all-to-all coupling' (each charging unit can face each other, i.e. "only two participants per unit").

However, it is unclear whether both of these possibilities are necessary and whether there are any limits to the charging speeds that can be achieved.

In the newly published study, scientists further explored these questions. The paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, suggests that all-to-all couplings are irrelevant in quantum batteries, and that the existence of global operations is the only factor in quantum advantage.

The team further pinpointed the exact source of this advantage while ruling out any other possibilities and even provided a definitive way to design such a battery.

In addition, the team precisely quantified how fast charging speeds can be achieved in this scheme. While the maximum charge rate increases linearly with the number of batteries in a classical battery, studies have shown that quantum batteries employing global operation can achieve an exponential increase in charging speed.

Figure | Illustration of current electric vehicles compared to future cars based on quantum battery technology

To illustrate this, the researchers hypothesized that a conventional electric vehicle had a battery containing about 200 cells. Using this quantum charging technology, the charging speed will be 200 times faster than that of conventional batteries, which means that charging time at home will be reduced from 10 hours to about 3 minutes. With the fast charging station, the charging time will be reduced from 30 minutes to a few seconds.

The researchers say the implications of this technology scenario could be far-reaching, and the realization of quantum charging could extend far beyond the field of electric vehicles and consumer electronics. For example, it may find critical uses in future nuclear power plants, where a lot of energy is required to enable instantaneous charging and discharging.

Of course, quantum technology is still in its infancy, and there is still a long way to go to implement these methods in practice.

However, findings such as these open up a promising direction and can incentivize funding institutions and businesses to invest further in these technologies. If realized, it is believed that quantum batteries will revolutionize the way we use energy and bring us closer to a sustainable future.

Resources:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02491

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/946882