Electric vehicles’ power packs can need eight hours or even longer to charge. But now Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Skeleton Technologies, an Estonian firm, claim to be able to put a usable charge into an EV in as little as 15 seconds.
The key: pairing a standard lithium-ion battery pack with a set of supercapacitors.
Supercapacitors, a battery cousin, hold electricity as a static charge, not chemically as batteries do. As a result, they can fully charge in a few moments and dump their power just as quickly and also recover otherwise wasted energy from a vehicle’s braking system.
Supercapacitors also hold much more electricity than conventional batteries and can be charged and emptied hundreds of thousands of times without wearing out, compared to batteries’ useful life of around 3,000 cycles.
The combination of battery and supercapacitor could allow an EV to take a quick charge and continue on to a place where it could settle in for a longer fill-up, effectively extending the vehicle’s range between charges.
Skeleton is already using its technology in specialized applications in trucks and buses. It says it has signed a billion-euro deal with a major manufacturer to take the technology to broader markets and is also working on an innovation that would increase an EV power pack’s energy density tenfold.
The company believes that future generations of supercapacitors will eventually replace batteries in electric vehicles altogether.
TRENDPOST: Skeleton’s technology is a first step. Next, engineers are likely to devise a way for supercapacitors to take a quick charge and then continually charge a vehicle’s battery pack as the EV is moving.
