NASA has suggested that an experimental cooling system it is funding could eventually allow EV owners to charge their cars in five minutes.
The agency said a team led by a Purdue professor developed the “supercooled stream boiling” technique used in experiments that it hopes will control the temperature of future systems in space.
“A team sponsored by NASA’s Division of Biological and Physical Sciences is developing a new technique that could not only achieve orders of magnitude improvements in heat transfer, allowing these systems to maintain proper temperatures in space, but also significantly reduce the Small size and weight of hardware,” NASA said in a blog post last week.
“More importantly, the same technology could make it easier and more feasible to own an electric vehicle on Earth,” the post continued.
NASA says that to charge an electric vehicle in five minutes would require a charger delivering 1,400 amps, much higher than currently available technology.
The post notes that most chargers available today support less than 150 amps, while some of the most advanced chargers on the market can deliver up to 520 amps.
But NASA said the cables developed by Purdue could dissipate heat through new technology, delivering up to 2,400 amps of current, which would provide charging at 4.6 times the speed of the fastest chargers currently available.
“The application of this new technology enables an unprecedented reduction in the time it takes to charge a vehicle and could remove one of the major barriers to the adoption of electric vehicles globally,” NASA wrote.
President Biden has emphasized the shift to electric vehicles as an important part of his climate initiatives, but the proposals have been criticized by some in the Republican Party, who have described the plans as elitist and a boon to the wealthy.
There are also questions about whether the U.S. grid can handle a hard transition to electric vehicles.
The Reducing Inflation Act, passed this summer, is a partisan settlement that includes billions of dollars in electric vehicle tax credits and other financial incentives.
It also includes a $7.5 billion investment in a network of charging stations in the U.S.
“The great American road trip will be fully electrified,” Biden said in Detroit last month. “Whether you’re driving down I-10 or I-75 in Michigan, charging stations will be built like gas stations today and easy to find.”