Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have successfully demonstrated the first 270-kW wireless power transfer to a light-duty electric vehicle. The demonstration used a Porsche Taycan and was conducted in collaboration with Volkswagen Group of America using the ORNL-developed polyphase wireless charging system.
As a light-duty passenger vehicle, the Porsche Taycan would be difficult to equip using conventional large, heavy wireless power transfer systems. The vehicle can’t support the charging hardware due to space, weight and volume limitations. Existing wireless charging systems for light-duty vehicles are currently under development for up to 11-kW power levels with up to 92% efficiency. Current industry standards cover up to 20-kW power levels.
The ORNL-invented system that transferred power to the Porsche uses lightweight polyphase electromagnetic coupling coils with a diameter just over 19 inches that allow for higher power density in the smallest coil possible. This process is similar to the wireless charging of small consumer devices, but the unique geometry and design of the polyphase coils enable the transfer of extremely high power levels using rotating magnetic fields generated by the coil phase windings to boost the power. The charging system was seamlessly integrated into the undercarriage of the vehicle.
The wireless power transfer technology also includes protection systems that prevent exceeding voltage and current limits, overheating and short-circuiting. These systems can initiate shutdown procedures in the event of power interruptions or other unexpected conditions that would interfere with safe power transfer.
“The receiver coil designed for the Porsche Taycan research vehicle can achieve 8 to 10 times higher power density compared to existing systems,” said ORNL’s Omer Onar, leader of the Vehicle Power Electronics group and lead researcher on the Porsche demonstration. “Per kilowatt weight, this is also the most lightweight charging system in the world.”
Power density is important in wireless charging because it indicates how much power the system can handle relative to its size. The goal is to achieve higher densities from smaller, more compact systems to improve overall efficiency and performance. ORNL’s system can achieve a 50% increase in state of charge within 10 minutes with more than 95% efficiency. The power transfer was conducted over a 4.75-inch gap between the ground and the coil mounted to the underside of the vehicle.
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Good for fleet vehicles
A 110 volt plug in charger charges a car faster than a 270 kilowatt charger that is never deployed.
For many decades, there were hypothetical ideas about having electric cars powered by some kind of magnetic induction system associated with major freeways and interstates. This was always “insanely impractical”, because only a fraction of the energy produced could be “taken up” by the technology of vehicles decades ago. You’d have a huge amount of electro-magnetic energy that WOULD have to go some where. Prior to being able to “target” the energy to any vehicle, you’d have to generate a vast amount, most would be wasted.
And most of that huge amount of EM energy, would make any living thing exposed to it, feel like your in a microwave oven. You’ve heard of “Havana Syndrome”? A technology we think may at least to some extent employ MW frequency radiation for nefarious intelligence reasons? Prior to such “fine tuning”, as defined above, a more blunt, primitive version of that technology once exposed would quickly heat up any ones dental fillings. If you had a pacemaker, you wouldn’t need to worry about replacing the battery. You wouldn’t live long enough to care.
Such targeted technology is a gentle, specific, tremendous advance. Very nice indeed.
I think the real issue here with roadbed charging is that the duty cycle for any particular foot of roadbed is really low, so an economical system can’t invest much money per unit area. If I were going to design a system I’d skip modifying the road bed and vehicles altogether, and have a fleet of simplified self-driving vehicles that would tow or carry your car for the long distance portion of the drive. This would be the sort of thing that could be marketed to people driving ICE vehicles, too. Who wouldn’t mind being able to kick back and relax on a long drive?
Highway is the easiest use case for self driving anyway, and this would leave your car fully charged/tanked at the destination, and the cost would scale with usage, not miles of road bed, so you wouldn’t have a financial penalty at low levels of market penetration.
You really need to think about minimum viable system considerations, which favor systems that scale with usage, so you don’t start out with the full cost on day one.
The charging system here wouldn’t be a bad thing to have installed where you park your car, but the power level is very excessive for private use. It’s more of a quick recharge during road trips thing, but that’s going to be a tiny fraction of charging.
Actually, at the moment EV’s seem to have hit market saturation at a percentage or two of the market. It’s not so much a case of them not being for everybody, as them being for very few people indeed. And that’s at massive levels of subsidy.
WOW, impressive.
This is the future I want, pull into your garage, and your car is charging, you don’t even have to think about it. Or pull into a supercharger station, and once you park, it starts charging, so if its raining or snowing, your cozy inside your car.
You won’t have a 270 kw charger in your private residence unless you’re very wealthy. That requires a commercial grid connection.
I think people wildly overestimate how important it is to have very high charge rates or the inconvenience of plugging in at home. High charge rates are nice when road tripping, but that it pretty rare. Even if you can’t charge at home, it is more useful to have ubiquitous or lower cost charging stations of moderate charge rate than ultra-fast chargers.
Andrew F: As you put it, I assume you mean “high charge rates”, mean’s the ability for any vehicle to “suck up” it’s maximum amount of electrical power, as quickly as possible. This is problamatic on two big fronts. First, is the ability to provide “surge power” to any one location, at a specific time. This may sound simple (and it is, however…) our current electrical infrastructure is now not today designed to do this. Sorry…
We are, thanks to trillions of $$ now being pumped into our “grid”, inventing new ways for it to work. But this will take years. For at least, the next say 10 years, we should look to our vehicles to be able to take “a big surge of power”, when it’s available, and feed it to the batteries, power cells, whatever, when possible. Taking more power, at any one moment, then a system is “familiar” with, creates problems. It shouldn’t, but it does. Sorry again…
Just doing what’s “unexpected”, is to many systems, quite “shocking”. Even when what’s “unexpected”, is to most of us, hardly shocking at all. I could go into details, but of course I wont. Certain lines I will never cross… Some times what is most obvious, is most important… Ya Da Ya DA…
Since our infrastructure can not yet handle “surge burst power” to any one location, at any one moment (as far as I know), our vehicles must be able to take advantage of whatever technology they can.
Of course not, but if it can do 270, it can obviously do a much lower number, closer to the 10-15 range.
Speed has nothing to do with it being wireless. Once you establish a wireless tech with 95% efficiency…you should immediately begin to iron out the path to commercialize it. People love simplicity…and this is it, hell, even be great for crime ridden LA, since you can’t steal the cable.