Student team InMotion, a 35-strong bunch of bright minds from TU/e Eindhoven, has presented its electric racing car with a very short charging time after three years. That happened on the campus of Eindhoven University.
Thanks to the Brabant ingenuity, the car can be charged within twelve minutes. During testing at Circuit Zandvoort, the car already drove 225 kilometers per hour and, according to models, it can even reach 300 kilometers per hour.
According to InMotion, the race car has the same capacity as a standard Tesla Model 3 (58 kWh), but charges this car twice as fast.
Cooling
The secret lies in the cooling of the battery pack, explains team manager Ewout Timmermans. Because the rapid charging of hundreds of batteries produces a lot of heat, the team developed a cooling method in which plates filled with coolant are placed between the batteries.
In this way they extract heat from the battery pack so that the battery can charge faster without overheating. “We are now even refining the technique by cooling at the cell level, so that we can charge within a few minutes. Since there are about 360 cells in a battery pack, that is quite a challenge”, explains Timmermans.
The ultimate dream of the team is to perfect the technique so that a charge becomes as fast as a ‘standard’ pit stop and therefore be able to participate in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.