Why are we not already able to “instant-charge” EVs, smartphones or other batteries?
In: Physics
Well, if you can swap batteries, that’s an “instant charge”. For instance, if you are using a cordless drill and it’s battery has drained, you pop the dead battery out, put it on a charger and pop a fresh one in.
And this may be a surprised to you, but before “smart phones” (ie; the Apple iPhone), this is exactly what people did. If you had a cell phone, it’s likely you had more than one battery. I had a Motorola StarTac Elite and three batteries, though admittedly the batteries only lasted 8 hours. But I always had to charged batteries on the charging stand. I’d get home and swap to fresh batteries, and I carried one to work in my briefcase. When high capacity batteries capable of 12+ hours came out, it was cheaper to make non-removable batteries with the expectation that people would charge their phones over night and have enough battery power for the next day.
For EV batteries, the batteries are HUGE, heavy and dangerous, but I would love to pull up to a service station, park in some battery swap spot and have a robot swap out an auxilliary battery pack that had like 100 miles of charge on it that would take less than 5 minutes or something… similar to filling a tank with gas.
But as to why you can’t instant charge a battery, it’s because we use chemical batteries and when we charge them, we are actually forcing chemical reactions to bring the chemicals back to a state of higher potential where they can again begin to release electricity. It’s like bringing water back up a hill so you can run a watermill with the running water. You can charge up a large capacitor with power, but caps release all their energy at once.
Maybe in the future, we’ll have a different technology to instantly charge batteries, but having different batteries.
For now the best you can do is swap batteries.
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