Electric cars provide many benefits, from lower running costs to rapid and smooth acceleration. Nonetheless, EVs mainly suffer from one disadvantage namely the time it takes to recharge.
Scientists are now looking into a technology that could potentially charge an EV in mere seconds.
In the future, this may take only a few seconds - (Image Credit: SofikoS via Shutterstock / HDR tune by Universal-Sci)
Civilization is slowly converting to renewable energy as we are beginning to comprehend the finite nature of fossil fuels.
One of the most remarkable developments on our road to sustainability must be the swift adaptation of EVs. Barely ten years ago, encountering an electric vehicle on the street was a rarity. Yet, in 2022 millions of them are in use in the United States alone.
As mentioned, electric cars provide many benefits, from lower running costs to rapid and smooth acceleration. Nonetheless, EVs have traditionally suffered from one major drawback due to the relatively low energy density of batteries compared to hydrocarbons, namely their range.
Consistent improvement in battery technology over time means that present-day EVs commonly have a considerably more extended range than those produced ten years ago.
We are at a point where the vast majority of daily trips can be done on a single charge. However, we are still at the mercy of chargers and fast chargers when it comes to long road trips. Charge times typically range between 10 hours (on a slow charger) to about 20 minutes on the fastest fast-chargers.
Quantum battery
In an effort to resolve the above-mentioned issues with charge times, scientists looked at the esoteric realm of quantum physics.
The notion of a "quantum battery" was initially introduced by Alicki and Fannes in a major study released in 2012. Quantum resources, such as entanglement have been proposed as a way to dramatically speed up the battery charging process by charging all cells in the battery at the same time in a collective manner.
Charging all cells at once sounds promising as modern batteries usually contain a large number of cells, making them particularly suitable for such a concept. Nonetheless, in traditional batteries, where the cells are charged in parallel and independently of one another, such collective charging is not conceivable.
The 'quantum charging advantage' ratio may be used to calculate the benefit of collective vs. parallel charging. A few years ago, scientists discovered that this quantum advantage might have two potential causes: specifically 'global operation' (where all cells talk to all the others at the same time) and 'all-to-all coupling' (in which every cell can talk with every other cell, but only one at a time).
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Until recently, it was unknown if both of these sources are required and whether the charging speeds are limited.
Now, a group of researchers from the Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems, attached to IBS, in South Korea has set out to examine this matter in more detail.
Their resulting paper revealed that all-to-all coupling is irrelevant in quantum batteries and that the existence of global operations is the only relevant component in the quantum benefit.
The team even went so far as to identify the precise basis of this advantage while ruling out any other options and actually delivered a straightforward method of developing such 'quantum batteries.'
On top of that, the paper quantifies how much charging speed can be realized. While the maximum charging speed increases linearly with the number of cells in conventional batteries, the study showed that quantum batteries utilizing global operation could achieve quadratic scaling in charging speed.
Quantum charging speeds
All in all, quantum charging could lead to a 200x speedup over conventional batteries, which means that home charging times would be cut from about 10 hours to approximately 3 minutes.
In this scenario charging time at fast-charging stations would be reduced from about half an hour minutes to mere seconds.
The team thinks that quantum charging could be implemented beyond EVs and other consumer electronics. One could, for example, think of future nuclear fusion power stations that would require massive amounts of energy to be charged and discharged at an instant.
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It is important to note that quantum technology is still in its infancy, meaning that there is a long way to go before we might reap the benefits. Nonetheless, these results are encouraging and may well revolutionize the future of energy and set us on a path towards a renewable future.
The team published their paper in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, listed below. Be sure to check it out if you are interested in a more detailed overview.
Sources and further reading:
Quantum Charging Advantage Cannot Be Extensive Without Global Operations (Physical Review Letters)
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