Slow charging periods are a big complaint when it comes to EV adoption, especially when contrasted to pumping stinking gas.
A team of scientists from IBS's Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems has resorted to quantum physics to address the charging time dilemma.
The team was inspired by a 2012 paper that offered a "quantum battery notion," which refers to a quantum mechanical system that can store energy.
Quantum batteries, according to the 2021 research and countless others that followed (for example, here, here, and here), might offer multiple benefits over conventional batteries due to quantum resources.
One of the most exciting features is the ability to charge at a much quicker rate.
The utilization of "entanglement processes," in which the battery cells are charged collectively as a whole, is the cause of this quantum speedup. Traditional battery cells, on the other hand, are charged in parallel and independently of one another, slowing down the entire process.
Quantum charging advantage is a ratio that measures the benefit of collective charging.
The goal of the IBS research team was to see how much the charging speed might be boosted.
The scientists discovered that collective charging, also known as "global operations protocol," may reach quadratic scaling in charging speed after conducting a series of theoretical tests.
This means that as quantum batteries grow in size, charging time decreases — in contrast to traditional batteries, where the number of battery cells increases, charging time decreases.
To put it another way, increasing the number of battery cells in an EV from one to ten improves the charging speed by a factor of four, and increasing the number of battery cells from one to ten increases the charging speed by a factor of 100.
According to the researchers, quantum charging might result in charging speeds 200 times quicker than standard batteries for a typical EV battery with 200 cells.
According to their calculations, charging an EV at home would take only three minutes instead of ten hours. Charging periods at high-speed stations would be reduced from half an hour to seconds.