Electric vehicles may get nuclear option
Fusion technology could be used to keep batteries cooler during charging process
The biggest roadblock to widespread adoption of electric vehicles in a big country like Canada is the time it takes to charge one up.
That could change if a group of British engineers utilization of nuclear fusion technology works in keeping batteries cool while they charge.
The reason it takes so long to charge up an electric vehicle — still some 45 minutes or so with state-of-the-art fast chargers — is that the battery packs get too hot to handle the incoming electricity.
So the Qdot engineering group is focusing on how to get the heat out of the battery packs so the flow of electricity into them can continue at a faster rate.
As the Sunday Times reports, to do this the engineers are using the same high-performance cooling system technology that is used on fusion reactors. One of Qdot’s co-founders, Jack Nicholas, did his PhD at Oxford University on designing the exhaust systems for such reactors, which reach temperatures equal to five times the centre of the sun.
The solution for the reactors was to drill a precise geometry of holes in metal plates — a pattern that is a commercial secret — that allows heat to keep flowing and be lost evenly through the plate.
While present EV batteries are designed with the cooling plates on the outside, Qdot has put them on the inside, allowing heat to be drawn away from the battery core rather than its outside elements.
“We’re using them like highways to get the heat out faster,” Qdot co-founder Tsun Holt Wong, told the Times.
The research is being done in collaboration with the Faraday Institution, and according to its head of technology transfer Ian Ellerington, they hope the system could be in vehicles in five years.