#InstantCharge #EVs #Smartphones #BatteryTechnology
Have you ever wondered why we can’t just plug in our electric vehicles or smartphones for a few seconds and have them instantly charged to full capacity? 🤔 It seems like something out of a sci-fi movie, but the reality is that there are several factors preventing us from achieving instant charging technology in our everyday gadgets. Let’s break it down and explore the reasons behind this limitation.
##The Science Behind Battery Charging
Before we delve into why instant charging is currently not possible, let’s first understand how battery charging works. When you plug in your device or EV for charging, electricity flows into the battery, causing a chemical reaction that stores energy. This process takes time as the ions in the battery need to move and react to store the energy efficiently. Attempting to speed up this process can lead to safety concerns such as overheating or damaging the battery.
##Factors Limiting Instant Charging
1. **Battery Chemistry**: The type of battery used plays a significant role in determining how quickly it can be charged. Lithium-ion batteries, commonly found in smartphones and EVs, have limitations in terms of how fast they can charge. Faster charging rates can cause damage to the battery’s internal components.
2. **Heat Generation**: Rapid charging generates heat within the battery, which can be detrimental to its lifespan and overall performance. Managing heat dissipation during charging is crucial to prevent overheating and potential safety hazards.
3. **Battery Capacity**: The size and capacity of the battery also impact the charging speed. Larger batteries require more time to charge fully, even with advanced charging technology. Attempting to rush the charging process can lead to inefficiencies and reduced battery life.
4. **Charging Infrastructure**: The current charging infrastructure, both for EVs and smartphones, is not designed to support instant charging. Fast-charging stations are already available, but they have limitations in terms of the amount of power they can deliver safely.
5. **Safety Concerns**: Ensuring the safety of users and preventing accidents is a top priority in battery technology. Rushing the charging process increases the risk of battery malfunctions, explosions, and fires. Manufacturers prioritize safety over speed when developing charging solutions.
##Recent Developments in Fast Charging
While instant charging may not be feasible at the moment, significant progress has been made in improving charging speeds for batteries. Researchers and manufacturers are continuously working on innovative solutions to overcome the limitations of current battery technology. Some of the recent advancements include:
– **Graphene Batteries**: Graphene-based batteries show promise in improving charging speeds and overall performance. The unique properties of graphene allow for faster ion movement within the battery, leading to quicker charging times.
– **Solid-State Batteries**: Solid-state batteries replace traditional liquid electrolytes with solid materials, enabling faster charging without the risk of leakage or overheating. These batteries have the potential to revolutionize the charging speed of electronic devices and EVs.
– **Advanced Charging Protocols**: Companies like Tesla and Qualcomm are implementing advanced charging protocols that optimize the charging process without compromising battery health. These protocols monitor battery temperature, voltage, and current to ensure safe and efficient charging.
##The Future of Instant Charging
While we may not have instant charging capabilities for EVs, smartphones, or other devices yet, the future looks promising. With ongoing research and development in battery technology, we can expect to see significant improvements in charging speeds and efficiency in the coming years. As more sustainable and high-performance batteries are introduced to the market, instant charging may become a reality sooner than we think.
In conclusion, the limitations of battery technology, safety concerns, and infrastructure constraints are the primary reasons we are not able to achieve instant charging for EVs, smartphones, and other devices. However, with continued innovation and investment in battery technology, we are moving closer to a future where instant charging is not just a dream but a practical reality. Stay tuned for exciting advancements in charging technology that will revolutionize the way we power our devices! 🔋🚗📱
Can you instantly fill a bathtub with water?
Batteries don’t actually store electricity. They store energy via chemical reactions. These reactions are typically exothermic and can actually be quite harsh on batteries.
Lithium batteries in particular are surprisingly sensitive and require special charging algorithms and processes to not experience a thermal runaway.
With the current technology, the bottom 80% of the battery can be bulk charged really fast, in a matter of sometimes _minutes_, and some smartphone manufacturers do this if you have a power supply that’s beefy enough. It’s just a question of managing temperature while pumping in current, and this part of the charge cycle is pretty simple. Damage in this phase still builds over time, but it’s manageable within a normal life cycle.
The top 20% is where lithium batteries are more sensitive and require extra attention to avoid damaging the structure of the anode, cathode, and electrolyte. or triggering a thermal runaway.
This is why your phone seems to charge really quickly at first and then really slows down, still taking a full hour to charge to 100%. This also applies to EV charging, but quite often the bulk charging phase is limited by the capability of the charger instead of the battery, especially with active cooling.
12 watt-hours is a typical capacity for a cell phone battery.
To recharge a battery that size from empty to full in one second would require 43 kilowatts. Basically the same as a car charger (ignoring all the power conversion that would be necessary)
Imagine if you had to shove a Tesla plug into your phone…
The best analogy I’ve seen is that a battery is like a car park. To charge it, you have to park all the lithium ions on an electrode, but there are only so many spaces for the ions to fit. Just like when a car park is busy, it can take the ions some time to find a space, and it gets more difficult the closer you get to fully charged.
Imagine you had a HUGE pile of bricks in your driveway that you wanted to move into your living room. Moving one at a time would require a little work over a long period of time – generating a little bit of heat (I.e. sweat) over a long period of time. You also probably wouldn’t scratch or damage your house in the process as you would be carefully setting each one down individually.
Now imagine moving as many bricks as you could carry at one time. Moving several bricks at a time would require a lot more work and generate more heat (sweat), but take less time. You would also cause some damage to your house in the process, by scratching walls and maybe damaging the floor when dropping them.
Now imagine trying to move ALL the bricks from your driveway into your living room instantly. It would require an enormous amount of energy to be applied in an instant and generate an enormous amount of heat, which would probably be similar to a bomb going off to move that much mass instantly. It would also destroy your house in the process.
Charging batteries is like moving electrons instead of bricks and moving them into our battery instead of your house. Maximizing the number that can be moved at a time is a delicate balance between applying the right amount of energy, dissipating the heat, and not damaging the “house” in the process.
We used to be able to carry spare batteries for our phones…
But they made them fixed for… Reasons.
As compared to other posts that already explain all of the relevant factors: it is possible to have electric vehicles that can “instantly” recharge, but not with existing systems, both in the vehicle, and the charging infrastructure. We would need even more powerful “instant discharge” charging stations that wouldn’t catch on fire, and capacitors rather than batteries.
We could, in theory, use capacitors rather than batteries to charge vehicles. Capacitors can charge up to full capacity almost instantly, but they do not have the same energy density as a battery and are meant to only hold a charge for a very small amount of time.
In a nutshell, a capacitor collects voltage, and amperage of varying charges, stores it up in a battery like device, and then outputs a known value of V and A consistently and reliably. This is generally used for electronics like computers that require relatively precise and accurate values to operate. Your wall socket in your house may output as low as 100V up to 135V at any given time. A capacitor constantly receives the incomming and variable voltage at a speed greater than it depletes, and sends out a perfect and constant 120v to the power circuit of the device it’s plugged into.
So, in theory, we could make a car that uses a capacitor as a battery, that has a very high and fast energy input, with an energy output limiter to slow and regulate the release of energy to power a car.
But, due to a very low energy density, you wouldn’t be able to fit as much energy into the physical size of the “capacitor” battery. Capacitors are also not great at storing energy, only temporarily holding it. They discharge quickly, so you would lose nearly all of your charge immediately after charging, like 25% per 10 minutes, unlike a battery that can store energy at a 5% loss per month.
This could result in being able to fully charge your vehicle’s capacitor in 5 seconds??? and could enable a driving range of 20km??? This is speculation/theory.. not real or known numbers, just pulled them out of my ass.
So, you could spend 5 seconds charging for 20km of range, or the equivalent of 25 seconds per 100km of vehicle range.
So, you would need to charge your car before leaving, and immediately drive it 20km to repeat the process. If you got out of it to go shopping and there wasn’t a charger, whatever charge you had left in it wouldxbe gone by the time you got back to the car, and you would be stranded.
The current system of charging speed vs travel distance is in place to be a reasonable balance. 20 minutes on a super charger can get someone a few hundred kilometers, and gives you a normal battery that doesn’t naturally dissipate its charge within minutes or hours.
Ideally, having a battery that can charge 80% in 3-5 minutes would be the ultimate goal of the tech, as this is how long it takes to put gas in most vehicles. It may just result in less distance than a gas vehicle can drive on a tank, and you may need to fill up 2/3x more frequently. We are already accustomed to the inconvenience and time to put gas in a car. If we can match that time to a reasonable driving distance, most people wouldn’t ever notice the difference between gas/electric.
The battery capacity is like the weight held by a rope and a pulley.
You charge it by pulling the rope from the pulley, the higher the weight is the higher the battery capacity is.
You can pull the rope really fast and the weight on the other end of the pulley will go up pretty fast, but you may get hurt and damage the pulley and the rope and maybe your own hands, and still you will possibly never get the weight up there “instantly”, you can use technology to do it faster but not instantly
Well, if you can swap batteries, that’s an “instant charge”. For instance, if you are using a cordless drill and it’s battery has drained, you pop the dead battery out, put it on a charger and pop a fresh one in.
And this may be a surprised to you, but before “smart phones” (ie; the Apple iPhone), this is exactly what people did. If you had a cell phone, it’s likely you had more than one battery. I had a Motorola StarTac Elite and three batteries, though admittedly the batteries only lasted 8 hours. But I always had to charged batteries on the charging stand. I’d get home and swap to fresh batteries, and I carried one to work in my briefcase. When high capacity batteries capable of 12+ hours came out, it was cheaper to make non-removable batteries with the expectation that people would charge their phones over night and have enough battery power for the next day.
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For EV batteries, the batteries are HUGE, heavy and dangerous, but I would love to pull up to a service station, park in some battery swap spot and have a robot swap out an auxilliary battery pack that had like 100 miles of charge on it that would take less than 5 minutes or something… similar to filling a tank with gas.
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But as to why you can’t instant charge a battery, it’s because we use chemical batteries and when we charge them, we are actually forcing chemical reactions to bring the chemicals back to a state of higher potential where they can again begin to release electricity. It’s like bringing water back up a hill so you can run a watermill with the running water. You can charge up a large capacitor with power, but caps release all their energy at once.
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Maybe in the future, we’ll have a different technology to instantly charge batteries, but having different batteries.
For now the best you can do is swap batteries.
Well imagine two plastic bottles taped to each other with its necks.
Water is in one bottle at the bottom and top bottle is full of air. If you turn them around water starts flowing to the bottom bottle (imagine this as charging battery from your adapter). If you watch closely there would be exchange in air and water which means some pressure and resistance. The whole point is to do it as fast as possible so in this scenario you can spin them to help create whirlpool so water can travel on the sides and air in the middle. Simple as that.
Batteries are much complex in chemical structure but basically doing the same you need to push electrons one direction when charging and push it other direction when discharging. If you force this PHYSICAL process you create heat so you can either charge them fast with active cooling or if you overdo it and it does boom same like two bottles but one would be squeezed with hands the pressure would destroy both bottles.
So it’s physics who dosent allow us charge instantly simply because our batteries are not advanced enough yet to be charged so fast.
Hi. I work at a thin film battery start up that’s an off shoot of energizer battery company.
Science is working on all of this in essence but the issues that allow a battery to “store “ a charge if you try to apply too much energy can damage the materials inside.
Its complex to execute
In China there is a brand of car that offers battery swapping stations. This an obvious solution to the charge time problem but requires a huge infrastructure investment and ideally, standard commodity batteries.
we already can. It’s called capacitor. Can instantly charge and discharge.
Among other problems, main one is that it’s too low density, so it wouldn’t drive too far.
The only things that release lots off energy really quickly are usually explosions, flames, and sparks/arcs.
Batteries are chemical energy storage. When you discharge a battery, there is a chemical change happening inside the battery. As that happens, heat is generated. If you allow the chemical change to happen too quickly, the reaction goes out of control and the battery catches fire.
When you charge a battery, you are reversing the chemical reaction that occurred during discharge. Again, the limiting factor is heat. If you try to reverse the reaction too quickly, heat will build up and the battery will catch fire.
It’s kind of like baking a cake. You mix up the ingredients, and put the cake in the oven at 350°F (176°C) for 30-45 minutes. If you tried to double the temperature and half the time, you’d end up with burned cake batter.
Charging a battery is similar. The chemical changes need time to interact as the battery charges. Going too quickly changes the reaction to something else.
Elon Musk in a podcast with Joe Rohan has a great explanation of battery charging. Look it up, it’s a great analogy to cars in a parking lot and the charging process.
The faster you want to charge something, the higher current you need.
High currents make things very hot.
Very hot things are dangerous, especially very hot flammable things.
There’s one way to instant charge: just replace the battery.
Used to be a thing when phone batteries were still removable.
There’s two problems with this idea. First, let’s understand what electricity is: the flow of electrons. For simplicity, imagine a wire as a hose carrying water. Imagine a battery as a bucket.
There’s a max rate for how much water your hose can deliver per second. The same is true for the wires in your home: there’s a max limit to how much power they can deliver per second.
There’s also a max rate for how much water a bucket can take per second. If you exceed this rate, then you end up spilling water instead of getting it into the bucket.
But this metaphor breaks down: electricity is much more complicated that water. Electrons repel each other. They don’t want to be packed together. The more electrons you have in a material, the harder it is to put more in there.
The way we pack lots of electrons together is through a variety of chemical reactions, which can only occur at specific rates. Going too quickly can cause the chemical reaction to fail to execute in some of the battery, leaving empty capacity and possibly damaging it permanently.
If you try to fill a battery up too fast, it overheats and can even catch on fire.
Note: we are actually moving “ions” around to charge batteries, not just packing in electrons, but for the sake of ELI5 I’ve simplified a lot of concepts here.
Battery tech is only so advanced. It’s gotten insanely better, but trying to discharge a capacitor into a large battery to ‘quick charge’ it in a sense can cause some hefty damage.
Had a conversation about this with electrical engineering professor and suprisingly modern batteries are able to take this much power, but it’s not practical. In smaller scale, the biggest problem is heat and with electric cars our infrastructure isn’t capable for instant charging
Batteries have an internal resistance. When electricity moves through resistance it generates heat. The more electricity you move, the more heat is generated.
One of the main limiters on battery charging is heat. Charge a battery too fast and it will over-heat. That results in fires or explosions.
To instant charge a battery we either need to be able to dissipate the heat very quickly or reduce the internal resistances so they don’t generate as much heat. Developing that capability is an area of significant research right now.
Battery technology is a balance between six different factors:
– Power capacity
– Physical size
– Charging/discharging speed
– Number of charge/discharge cycles before significant degradation
– Propensity to explode
– Cost
Getting all six in balance is tough – it is easy to focus on one or two at the cost of the others, but consumer electronics need all six. A battery that ~~maximizes~~ optimizes all six is the holy grail of battery science.
To your question, instant charging would create a ton of heat (electrical resistance) and that heat will damage the number of charging cycles and/or increase the propensity for the battery to explode. Neither is acceptable – the exploding thing is obvious, but no one wants a battery that charges in seconds but can only be charged a few dozen times before it no longer holds a charge.
Batteries work using a chemical reaction. That reaction has limits to how quickly it can proceed. You just physically can’t try and push energy in faster. Also there’s thermal issues because trying to charge too quickly will cause the battery to heat up above sage limits.