EV chargers

With growing concern of carbon dioxide emission, greenhouse effects and rapid depletion of fossil fuels raise the necessity to produce as well as adopt new Eco-friendly sustainable alternatives to the internal combustion engine (IEC) driven vehicles.

Electric vehicles required a source of DC or AC supply to charge their batteries, which is commonly supplied from the power grid. Residential charging is usually performed at either 120 V, 12A (1.5KW) or 240V, 20–50A (5KW to 12KW). Electric vehicles are usually supplied with an AC EVSE or Electric vehicle supply equipment, have a vehicle plug and a residential wall plug on the other.

DC fast charger, on the other hand, can be often found at dedicated EV charging plazas and often supply 50KW to 350KW of power. Due to complexity of the equipment and the amount of power needed, DC fast chargers are rarely found in residential or workplace parking areas. DC chargers contains rectifier inside of its charging system whereas in case of AC charging system rectifier is fitted inside the EVs.

All these chargers work in conjunction with the battery management system (BMS) that support the battery to rectify and boost the supply voltage to the necessary voltage for the battery, perform constant current and constant voltage charging and stop charging if any fault conditions are detected in the battery or supply equipment. Moreover, some chargers also offer some scheduling system which allows the driver to plug in but defer charging until a specific time.

In North America, vehicles will often be supplied with CCS combo connector, which incorporates both AC and DC charging into one connector. However, in the remaining world CHAdeMo is adopted as a standard connector.

Another mechanism of charging car battery is by battery swapping which essentially supports swapping of discharged batteries in a vehicle with fully charged batteries from a shelf. A key benefit of battery swapping mechanism is the reduced time for energy replenishment in EVs as battery swap can be possible within 5–15 minutes compared to up to eight hours required for charging battery. However, the battery swapping model has not fully succeeded on a large scale due to techno-commercial dynamics.

But we are still lacking behind in terms of range of the car and that what makes the buyer hesitate to purchase the car. Currently, long-range travel in EV does require some careful planning and longer stops than would normally be taken by a gasoline powered car to refuel.

Nevertheless, battery technology is constantly improving and progressing and each generation of new EVs can charge faster than the ones before. It is only a matter of time that all the gas stations are going to replaced by EV charging stations that cost way less than what we are paying today. All of us are experiencing drastic change in the environment and common masses are aware of the consequence and that’s why they are focusing on purchasing electric vehicle as their car option. So let’s join this venture and helps safe the planet from demolishing.