I was reading an article on the prospects of using electric vehicle batteries to help smooth out grid demand, especially in California. That got me thinking.
For this to work, the car charger would have to control somehow if it was providing power to, or asking for power from the battery in the car. How does this happen? I’m not asking how the electronics talk to each other, I mean how do we control which way the electricity goes.
My first thought is the electricity would flow towards the side with lower resistance (or voltage or something like that, I’m no electrical engineer.) But then I thought about my wireless headphones. They are an example of one battery charging another and the charging cradle will happily drain its battery down to a very low state in order to charge up the actual headphones. Perhaps the wireless headphone thing is a bit of smoke and mirrors and the battery in the charging cradle is actually “stronger” even when it says it is nearly depleted…
Anyway, how do we control which way the electricity flows?
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For dumb batteries power flows through potential levels, like how two water puddles will level off if connected.
However, car batteries (and presumably your charging cradle) use sophisticated charging circuits which manage the voltages (which will also manage the current flow). They can use things like “DC-to-DC boost circuits” to change the potentials and change which way current and power flows. There’s also circuits that do DC -> AC -> higher voltage AC -> DC, lots of ways to change up voltage.
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