If perfected, this method can charge 90% of the battery of electric vehicles within ten minutes, solving a long-standing problem of skeptics about electric vehicles.
For many Americans, electric cars have been attractive until they consider taking them on long trips.
A petrol powered car might give them an average of 400 miles on top - while refueling takes a few minutes. Electric vehicles are more likely to travel 200 to 300 miles when fully charged, and may take 15 to 3 minutes to recharge before they hit the road again.
This is one of the main challenges facing politicians and car companies trying to increase the adoption rate of electric vehicles: the skeptical consumer group is willing to find any reason not to switch.
With the arrival of electric vehicles, the future journey may be bumpy. The large-scale adoption of electric vehicles will change our understanding of cars - from driving to maintenance. But this transition will be bumpy.
In a report released this week, government researchers said they had found a way to charge up to 90% of electric vehicle batteries in 10 minutes. Scientists say it may take another five years for this method to enter the market, but it will mark a fundamental change.
Eric dufek, the lead author of the study and a scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory in the United States, said: "our goal is very, very close to the [times] you see on the air pump. The laboratory is a research center operated by the Department of energy."
The report comes as the Biden administration has taken on a difficult task: trying to rid the United States of gas guzzling cars and push them to electric vehicles. Despite billions of dollars invested by the government, electric vehicles are still considered elitist, unreliable and cumbersome to charge - making people hesitant to change.
At present, car manufacturers and public charging stations use a variety of chargers to provide different degrees of charging time. According to the U.S. Department of transportation, the slowest, called a level 1 charger, can charge an electric vehicle battery in 40 to 5 hours. Some of the fastest, called DC chargers, can charge up to 80% of the battery in 20 minutes to an hour.
Tesla's vast supercharger network can provide 200 miles of charging in 15 minutes, the company said. But the equipment it uses prevents it from using other electric vehicles in the United States. (the White House said in a statement in June that Tesla will release supercharging equipment that non Tesla drivers can use later this year.)
But in the past decade, the electric vehicle super charging race has encountered obstacles. The problem is the delicate balance between trying to charge the electric vehicle battery faster, but not so fast that fast charging can cause long-term damage to the battery or cause the battery to explode. Scientists say that fast charging batteries will cause damage and reduce the service life and performance of batteries.
Eric D. Wachsman (eric-d-wachsman), director of the Energy Innovation Institute of Maryland, said: "when I first got the battery, it was great, but after several years or hundreds of charging cycles, their performance was not so good." The Institute is an energy research institution of the University of Maryland.
To solve this problem, dufek and his team used machine learning to calculate the aging of the battery when it was quickly charged. Their algorithm can be trained to analyze 20000 to 30000 data points, which indicate the charging status of the battery and whether the battery is aging or degraded.
Dufeck said that the method they found can charge up to 90% of the electric vehicle battery in 10 minutes, but they hope to do better. In the next five years, dufek's team is trying to find a way to increase the charging speed of the battery to 20 miles per minute, far exceeding the highest performance super charger, which hovers around 10 to 15 miles per minute.
"I think we can get there," dufik said
Wahsman said the new research is very helpful in this field. "Neither too fast nor too slow." He said of dufisk's charging method: "it happens to be in that Goldilocks [area]."
But he said that the greater advantage is that if this method can stimulate automobile companies to produce electric vehicles with smaller batteries, because the batteries they now have can be charged faster, so that consumers do not have to worry about stopping regularly to charge quickly.
"Smaller batteries are cheaper cars," he said
The industry also faces other problems. JD Power and associates (an American market information company founded in 1968, it investigates the quality of products and services, customer satisfaction and consumer purchase behavior in automobile, banking and other industries, especially its new car quality satisfaction survey.) He said that many electric vehicle customers are not satisfied with public charging stations, mainly because the charging stations fail or stop service.
Brent Gruber, executive director of JD Power's global automotive business, said in a statement: "everyone knows that the focus of gas stations is convenience - ready to use, fast refueling and fast and convenient items. No matter how fast their vehicles charge, ev owners still say that they need more options to do things during each charge to improve convenience and fill downtime."
Marc Geller, a spokesman for the electric vehicle Association, an industry nonprofit, said that it is widely believed that faster charging time is a major obstacle for customers not to buy electric vehicles. Geller said: "this view is obviously true and largely irrelevant. The bigger problem is that demand exceeds supply."
He said that most consumers will choose to charge their cars at home because it is more convenient and cheaper than public charging stations, which charge more than public utility companies.
"There's nothing more reliable or cheaper than charging at home," Geller said.
