Energy Efficiency, Industrial, Sourcing Renewables  -  November 12, 2021

Purdue Invents Faster EV Charging System

Purdue University engineers invented a new, patent-pending charging station cable that would fully recharge certain electric vehicles in under five minutes or about the same amount of time it takes to fill up a gas tank.

Current chargers on the market are limited in how quickly they can charge an EV’s battery due to the danger of overheating. A higher current needs to travel through the charging cable to charge an EV faster. When the current is higher, there needs to be a greater amount of heat that must be removed to keep the charging cable operational. The cooling systems that chargers currently use are only able to remove so much heat.

Using an alternative cooling method, Purdue researchers designed a charging cable that can deliver a current 4.6 times that of the fastest available EV chargers on the market by removing up to 24.22 kilowatts of heat. The project was funded by a research and development alliance between Ford Motor Co. and Purdue that was formed in 2017.

“My lab specializes in coming up with solutions for situations where the amounts of heat that are produced are way beyond the capabilities of today’s technologies to remove,” said Issam Mudawar, Purdue’s Betty Ruth and Milton B. Hollander Family Professor of Mechanical Engineering in a statement.

Mudawar says his lab intends to begin testing a prototype charging cable in the next two years to determine more specific charge speeds for certain models of electric vehicles.

Electric vehicle charging time can vary widely currently from 20 minutes at a station alongside a roadway to hours using an at-home charging station. Wait times and charger location are both cited as major sources of anxiety for people who are considering electric vehicle ownership.

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