What if your electric vehicle could be charged while you operate it?
Cornell University researchers have been working on exactly that, devising a remedy to one of the most significant barriers to electric vehicle adoption: battery capacity and charging accessibility.
Khurram Afridi, a senior lecturer of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell, is working on a software that will enable drivers to recharge their electric vehicles while driving. For the past seven years, he has been working on projects to install wireless charging facilities on the US highways.
“There will be a charging lane on highways, similar to a high traffic lane,” Afridi told Insider. “You’d switch into the charging path if your battery was running low. It will be able to determine which vehicle entered the path and give you a bill.”
Although it will take five to ten years for the project to be ready for major highways, Afridi sees wireless charging as the ideal way to alleviate drivers’ worries of running out of battery and locating charging stations.
There are approximately 1.8 million battery-powered vehicles on the US roads today, and only around 100,000 charging stations are available at about 41,000 public station locations. President Joe Biden has promised to create 500,000 new outlets over the next ten years, a target that some analysts believe would be difficult to achieve.
Due to the difficulty of finding EV charging stations, one out of every five electric car owners turned back to a gas-powered vehicle, according to a new report from the University of California Davis. According to JD Power information, anxiety about an electric car’s battery capacity is a major limiting factor in the vehicles’ market potential.
“The only reason people would buy electric vehicles is if they are as simple to refill as gasoline engines,” Afridi said. “Electric cars would have far less drawbacks than conventional vehicles if we had this [wireless charging] innovation.”
Nikola Tesla, the pioneer who used intermittent electromagnetic waves to control lights without having to plug them in, is credited with the science behind Afridi’s project. Afridi’s solution involves embedding special metal rods in the road that are attached to a power cable and a high-frequency power converter.
California’s Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) programme tested an inductive charging system for public highway cars in 1986. Companies such as Apple and Samsung have pushed for inductive charging for phones in recent times. Wireless charging, on the other hand, has largely failed because the hardware has proved to be costly and sometimes unwieldy.
According to Afridi, wireless charging hasn’t taken off because tech firms have focused on magnetic fields rather than electric ones. Varying magnetic fields actually require large, costly hardware and consume more energy than they produce.
According to Afridi, charging through electric fields has been largely ignored due to the high frequencies required, and magnetic field lines are also easier to produce. However, after his time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1987, the scientist has been involved in moving innovation to its highest possible frequencies.
