Electric Vehicles have many advantages over the internal combustion engine cars, however, one area the latter still rules is the amount of time it takes to refill a full tank. A petroleum powered vehicle takes lesser time to fill up the tank than an electric vehicle takes to fully recharge.
Scientists from the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea have come up with a solution that will drastically reduce the recharging time to mere seconds.
Currently, the fastest supercharging station take around 20 to 40 minutes to fully charge a battery from flat while home charging solutions take the whole night, however, the team from IBS state that their technology can do the same job in three minutes at home and just 9 seconds at charging stations.
This revolutionary technology is made possible by the laws of quantum physics to power all of a battery’s cells at once.
Dr Rosa, Co-author of the findings in the Physical Review Letters journal said: ‘This is particularly exciting as modern large-capacity batteries can contain numerous cells. Such collective charging is not possible in classical batteries, where the cells are charged in parallel independently of one another.’
Dr Dario Rosa said: ‘The consequences could be far-reaching and the implications of quantum charging could go well beyond electric cars and consumer electronics.’
The researchers found that a typical electric vehicle with a battery containing around 200 cells would recharge 200 times faster.
As ground breaking as this new system is, the researchers noted that quantum technology is still at its infancy but the findings would spark developments into that direction and eventually realise real life applications.
Co-author Dr Dominik Safránek said: “Of course, quantum technologies are still in their infancy and there is a long way to go before these methods can be implemented in practice.’
‘Research findings such as these, however, create a promising direction and can incentivise the funding agencies and businesses to further invest in these technologies.’
A super fast refilling system as this would make more people consider the jump to electric vehicles even in countries where charging infrastructure is scarce since lines at stations would move significantly faster.
