9 seconds to fully charge an electric car! Quantum charging increases speed by 200 times

10 years ago, we hardly saw electric cars on the road, but now millions of electric cars are sold every year. The electric vehicle market is one of the fastest growing industries. The EU even plans to completely ban the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. However, energy storage technology restricts the replacement of fuel vehicles by electric vehicles.

Recently, researchers from Korea's Institute of Basic Science (IBS) have proposed a quantum charging technology that can charge electric vehicles 200 times faster, making charging as easy as refueling. A related paper was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The source of quantum charging advantages

Unlike conventional vehicles, which derive their energy from the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels, electric vehicles rely on batteries as the energy storage medium. The energy density of early batteries was much lower than that of hydrocarbons, resulting in very short ranges for electric vehicles. Gradual improvements in battery technology have finally brought electric vehicle range to acceptable levels compared to gasoline-powered vehicles.

But consumers today still face slow battery charging. Currently, it takes about 10 hours for a car to fully charge at home. Even the fastest superchargers at the charging station take 20-40 minutes to fully charge the car. This creates additional cost and inconvenience for consumers.

To solve this problem, Robert Alicki and Mark Fannes published a seminal paper in 2012, which first proposed the concept of "quantum battery".

Their research found that quantum technology may lead to new mechanisms to charge batteries at a faster rate. In theory, quantum resources such as entanglement could greatly speed up the battery pack charging process by simultaneously charging all the individual cells of the battery pack in a collective manner.

This is especially exciting because modern high-capacity battery packs can contain many cells. Such collective charging is not possible in conventional battery packs because the individual cells in the pack are charged in parallel independently of each other. The advantage of this collective charging over parallel charging can be measured by a ratio called the "quantum charging advantage."

Today's Electric Vehicles vs. Future Vehicles Based on Quantum Battery Technology

By 2017, researchers noticed that this quantum advantage could come from two sources: "global operation", in which all cells communicate with each other at the same time, as if everyone were sitting at a table; "all to all coupling", where each cell can communicate with all other cells, but only one-to-one at a time, like many discussion groups, but each group has only two members.

However, it was previously unclear whether both sources are necessary and whether there are any limitations on charging speed.

Recently, researchers from the Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems at the Korea Institute for Basic Science (IBS) explored these questions further.

The paper, selected as an Editors' Choice by the journal Physical Review Letters, shows that all-to-all coupling is irrelevant in quantum batteries and that the existence of global operation is the only factor for quantum advantage.

They further pinpoint the exact source of this advantage, while ruling out any other possibility, and even provide a clear way to design such a battery.

Link to the official version of the paper:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/accepted/b2071Y51Ued1187a36cd9e31803b4e2fe0b5fa51e

Link to preprint paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02491

First quantitative advantage: 200 times faster charging

In addition, the team was able to precisely quantify the charging speeds achievable with the scheme. While the maximum charging speed of conventional batteries increases linearly with the number of cells, research has shown that quantum batteries with global operation can achieve a quadratic increase in charging speed.

In a typical electric vehicle, for example, the battery pack contains about 200 cells. Adopting this quantum charging technology will result in 200 times faster than conventional batteries, which means that charging time at home will be reduced from 10 hours to about 3 minutes. At high-speed charging stations, charging time will be reduced from 30 minutes to just a few seconds.

The researchers say the impact of quantum charging could extend far beyond electric vehicles and consumer electronics. For example, it could find critical use in future fusion power plants that require massive charging and discharging in an instant. Quantum technology is still in its infancy, and there is still a long way to go before these approaches can be implemented in practice. However, research findings such as these create a promising direction and could motivate funding agencies and businesses to further invest in these technologies. If put into use, quantum batteries could revolutionize the way we use energy and bring us closer to a sustainable future.

Link:

https://ibs.re.kr/cop/bbs/BBSMSTR_000000000738/selectBoardArticle.do?

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