The energy transmitted by the charging cables is at odds with the heat that they can handle, for this reason chargers have a limitation that with a good heatsink could be solved. Engineers believe they have succeeded.
The great objective of the electric business is to shorten the charging times of cars. This is the great handicap they have (apart from the prices), and until they solve it the EVs have very difficult to become the majority option.
Luckily for the industry, thousands of engineers, scientists, universities and companies are working to achieve more efficient, larger and longer lasting batteries. But all that has to go hand in hand with faster loads.
And in that sense there is a new advance that takes advantage of an alternative cooling technology to remove heat from the charging cable, allowing you to handle the type of current necessary to charge an electric car in less than five minutes.
The charging speed of an electric vehicle depends, among other factors, on the current that the charging cable can withstand, and a higher current carries a higher amount of heat.
Current solutions rely on liquid cooling systems to prevent the cable strands from overheating, but these systems cannot be expanded to accommodate higher currents for fast charging without the cable becoming cumbersome and unwieldy.
Scientists at Purdue University have been exploring a cooling system alternative for such applications, based on what is known as steam chambers (what we see on some high-end graphics cards).
At, a special liquid is passed through a heat source and brought to a boil, generating vapor bubbles that flow past the heat source and condense back into liquid form that is continuously recirculated through the closed system.
According to the team, which has been working on this liquid-to-vapor cooling technology for 37 years, systems that capture heat using both liquid and vapor forms are capable of removing more than 10 times the heat that current liquid cooling systems dissipate.
This means that the technology could be integrated into an electric vehicle charging cable with a much higher current without the need to expand its size. If this research proves reliable, we would be facing a big step towards ending the extremely long waiting times.