Comment on A robot just swapped my electric car's battery
eerongal@ttrpg.network 6 months agoThis is already what they do. Dry batteries that are bigger than about your phone are generally comprised a whole lot of battery cells. If you ever take em apart, you’d basically see the cells are made up of what looks like a whole bunch of AA batteries (but larger).
They do charge “in parallel”, but that’s limited by how much electricity you can feed through into the system as a whole, and doesn’t speed up the process, it just makes them all fill at about the same rate.
Making the cells swappable is basically what this video is about.
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
I mean separately. Why limit it to a single charging system? What if you had 2 (DC) charging ports, each capable of only charging half of the cells? Many heavy duty trucks have 2 gas tanks, each with a separate fuel door. They can be filled by 2 pumps simultaneously, cutting refueling time in half. What about 4? 10?
Obviously there would be downsides (cost being a big one), but it would enable faster charging.
eerongal@ttrpg.network 6 months ago
I mean, this is still more or less what the fast charging standards do; they’re pouring more power into it faster with higher bandwidth cables and sectioned charging.
The level 3 fast charger is basically the equivalent of 4 power cords from your wall. Also, adding more and more hardware and things for it will effectively make the electronics more complicated, which means more expensive, difficult to manufacture and repair
But also, as you scale this up more and more you’ll start running into issues that make it difficult to start pulling more power; energy from the grid isn’t infinite