Charging times are a very important part of getting people to buy electric cars, and exciting new developments are being made to get people back on the road as quickly as possible. US company Enovix wants to help with all of this by making the next generation of batteries, which it says can now be nearly fully charged in less than 10 minutes.
Scientists who work on batteries want to cut the amount of time it takes to plug in an electric car by valuable minutes. Both research groups and private companies have made progress in this area. This includes studies about aluminum-ion batteries and experimental electrodes that could cut the time it takes to charge a battery to just a few minutes. Startups like StoreDot and big-name companies like Volvo are also getting involved.
The tech company ABB says its electric vehicle charger is the fastest in the world because it can fully charge a car in 15 minutes or less. Enovix is trying to beat these numbers with its own battery architecture, which is a “3D cell architecture” with an EV-class cathode and anode made from silicon.
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Silicon has come up a lot in battery research over the past 10 years. The material is preferred as an alternative to the graphite used in today’s anodes because it can store energy much better. Enovix doesn’t give specific numbers about this aspect of performance. Instead, it says that its battery design increases energy density and that it can go through more than 1,000 cycles while still having 93% of its original capacity.
With the help of a grant from the US Department of Energy, the company has been working on its technology and hopes to come up with a solution that can be used for more than just EVs. It said on Monday that it had shown that its battery could be charged from 0% to 80% in as little as 5.2 minutes and from 0% to more than 98% in less than 10 minutes.
