The battery of the electric race car of TU/e student team InMotion can charge in a record time of less than four minutes.
Precisely, it takes 3 minutes and 56 seconds to charge the battery fully. With the battery, the racing car can also bridge a considerable distance: the car can cover about 250 kilometres on a fully charged battery charge.
The most important challenge was battery life when switching to electric automobiles. InMotion has been working on this for about eight months already.
Cooling
“In the past, we have developed an innovative cooling technology at a module level, where cooling plates filled with cooling liquid are placed between the modules with cells. As a result, we got a lot of heat out of the package,” explains team manager Julie Niemeijer. “If you want to extract the heat from the battery pack as effectively as possible, you want to cool as close to the battery cells as possible.”
‘Between every cell’
The students have succeeded in flooding the coolant between every adjacent cell and thereby reducing the heat. “And that has a hugely positive effect on the lifespan and repeated fast charging. A 24-hour test shows that the degradation of the battery pack is minimal,” says Niemeijer.
Industry
The student team has demonstrated that it is possible to reduce the charging time of electric cars. This should make electric cars more attractive. “If a group of motivated students can achieve this, then the industry can, of course, not stay behind,” comments the TU/e.
For Eindhoven News: Beena Arunraj
