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Just a quick question for those that know about electric cars. Can you physically charge them while driving, or does the system lock you out of charging if the car is in motion?

Most prevent you charging while driving because they're designed to be charged while stationary. Mine won't allow you to engage a gear while it's still plugged in, for example. I'm not even sure how you would charge them while driving, in a practical sense?

Yeah im curious how you wpuld charge while driving, unless you strap a solar panel tp tje roof or are towing a diesel generator or something?

The only ones I know of that do charge-whilst-driving are those that are hybrids; where you charge the electric whilst using the fossil fuel side of things.

There are also lorry systems for fully electric which have been tested where the lorry basically works like an electric train and puts up a connector whilst on key-roads with overhead powerlines. With the idea they run off that and can charge whilst on the main roads and then switch to internal power when leaving those networks.

Context here:

Old college friend of mine has gotten his hands on a Solo electric car, and he wants to use it as a short to mid-range commuter vehicle in the fall/spring. It's a tiny 3-wheel, one-seat, super cheap electric car from Canada. It has a range of about 80 miles. It's infamous because a small malfunction in it meant it was cheaper for the company to buy back all the cars and destroy them than to fix it.

There are only a few left on the planet. The previous owner, for whatever reason, put a roof rack on it. The roof rack is about 3x4 feet, and is the PERFECT size for a solar panel. We did the math, and the panel we are looking at would require about 120 hours to fully-charge the battery in average sunlight conditions. So, in his average 9-hour workday, plus 45 minute commute, he could charge enough for an extra 7 miles for cruising around. It's really just a silly reason to do this, since the roof rack is already installed.

at that point you are talking about basically hacking the cars system to override it.

If you plan to just suppliment normal charging, i would say go ahead. Maybe you could even try to track down the manufacturer and see if they would be willing to help. Especially if its basically a defunct product.

I think it would require more than just hacking the software. A system that can discharge and charge at the same time is going to be different to one that does one or the other separately.

It might be dangerous (fire etc..) or at the very least might destroy the life of the battery. So you'd get a few extra miles at the start and then very quickly lose battery performance

Reaching out to the parent firm can't hurt, but be prepared for a "we can't" or a "its risky so we won't risk advice" angle from them.
You might get more luck connecting with an online electric car community or garage and going from that angle as you won't be the first to think of this idea and many might well have solutions or ideas. You might also consider "off grid" communities too as that's the kind of thing they'd be keenly into as well.

At the very least, you can plug the solar panel in while parked at work and at home when you're not driving. I'm sure that would be worthwhile even if you lose out on the 1.5 hours of charging while driving. It's charging that isn't going on your electric bill.

The answer the thread question itself, a lot of electric and hybrid vehicles can use regenerative breaking to reclaim a bit of juice for the battery. Technically this is charging so a vehicle with that feature has the capability to charge on the go.

There have also been ideas bandied about with coils under main roads to provide inductive charging while suitors are driving, but I don’t know how that type of system might differ from the specific car in Question. Sounds like a fun project, but it might well wreck the vehicle

 Haighus wrote:
The answer the thread question itself, a lot of electric and hybrid vehicles can use regenerative breaking to reclaim a bit of juice for the battery. Technically this is charging so a vehicle with that feature has the capability to charge on the go.

Not necessarily. Not sure about hybrids, but in a purely electric car the regenerative braking only operates while the battery is not supplying power to the motor. That might mean it's not possible to use the regenerative feature while also powering the motor.

To the OP, your friend would likely be much better off not bothering with the solar panel during driving and just using it as a source of power to recharge while parked for the day. It would be a lot less difficult to implement and the extra range provided while driving (assuming it was technically possible to do) would be negligible. For reference, Fisker were an EV manufacturer that produced a car with solar panels in the roof. This was a professionally designed, fully integrated charging system with the car designed to utilise it from conception. It was basically a gimmick that provided no real world utility.

Excuse my ignorance, but would a simple solution be to have the solar array hooked up to a battery, which you can then use to charge the main battery when parked?

Not exactly the solution looked for, but possibly a practical application?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Excuse my ignorance, but would a simple solution be to have the solar array hooked up to a battery, which you can then use to charge the main battery when parked?

Not exactly the solution looked for, but possibly a practical application?

Not really. EVs, even older short-range ones, need a lot of power. You'd basically need another EV battery to store the electricity in. A regular 12V car battery won't cut it. Apart from anything else, the charging architecture of most cars requires voltages way above 12V. Then you have to think about balancing the extra weight of the battery you've added against the reduction in range that extra weight will give you. I suspect you'd likely see a net reduction in range given how short-ranged the car in question is. The other problem is any battery with enough storage to be worthwhile is likely going to be too big to fit into what seems to be a very small vehicle.

The thing is, solar panels are not expensive nowadays. If they were actually useful for recharging EVs every manufacturer would likely cover the roof with them. You'd see at least some doing it, even if some thought it was too complicated. The reality is, the differential between the energy a solar panel will provide and the energy required to charge an EV is simply too vast to be of any use. Maybe in the future, if solar panels and EV batteries become more efficient it might be viable, but it isn't right now.

As with all seemingly good ideas, turns out there’s a reason it’s not already common practice

You can't trickle charge an EV battery pack while drawing power from it.
Charging happens because the input supply is higher than the cells existing charge level.
If you are drawing power at the same time, the input power needs to be greater than both the drawn power and the charge level of the complete battery array in order for charging to occur.
Regenerative braking systems need a secondary battery set to hold their charge, and any which try to feed that back to the motive system need a step-up transformer to do so which incurrs transformative losses.
And then you need to calculate how the extra weight affects the efficiency of your primary drive system.

At some point EVs are going to be a huge recycling problem. Its not like you can add the scrap material into your refining process like you can with steel smelting.

 Haighus wrote:
The answer the thread question itself, a lot of electric and hybrid vehicles can use regenerative breaking to reclaim a bit of juice for the battery. Technically this is charging so a vehicle with that feature has the capability to charge on the go.

Yeah, mine can do this, though you do have to specifically turn it on. And I think it's not just braking, just releasing the gas pedal when going downhill for instance will trigger it.

 SirDonlad wrote:
…

At some point EVs are going to be a huge recycling problem. Its not like you can add the scrap material into your refining process like you can with steel smelting.

More like at some point it will become economically viable to do something clever to whatever feedstock of spent vehicle batteries. Batteries need to be added to the vehicle so they can surely be remounted relatively easily allowing the rest of the vehicle to go through the same scrap cycle as ICEVs.

Oh, we'll just outsource the problem to some nebulous engineer/scientist group who can break physics with enough money applied...


Please educate yourself on the chemical processes used for LiPON cells and then provide a way of seperating lithium nanostructures from a solid electrolyte.

Hard mode: provide a method which is cost effective without just applying taxes to new cell production to artificially make it cost effective.

I'm pretty sure you just described modern science and industrial R&D. It's not my problem. To solve as I'm neither a battery specialist nor a materials specialist, but there are a lot of them out there, and at some point there will be enough money in it to make it a useful project to focus on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh hey, look. They do it already.

https://www.fortum.com/media/2023/04/fortum-battery-recycling-opens-europes-largest-closed-loop-hydrometallurgical-battery-recycling-facility-finland

Also worth noting that EV batteries are lasting a lot longer than was originally expected. Even after they're of no use in an EV, they can still be used elsewhere. The ones in my car will eventually end up providing power storage for the Amsterdam Arena, for example. Many batteries are a along way from needing their materials recovered and recycled.

As someone who works in a Chemistry department (in a non-scientific capacity) I can tell you there is a lot of money currently being poured into green research, specifically carbon capture and rare earth materials recovery. As noted above, processes already exist but there's more that can still be done, but we have time.

 Flinty wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh hey, look. They do it already.

https://www.fortum.com/media/2023/04/fortum-battery-recycling-opens-europes-largest-closed-loop-hydrometallurgical-battery-recycling-facility-finland

A headline does not make an argument.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c02602

The increased life expectancy is likely the result of battery treatment in use - failure from dendritic growth shorting happens as a result of output voltage being over material specific values (typically 4.something volts) so if you make sure the power draw is below that you inhibit dendritic growth.

 Flinty wrote:
There have also been ideas bandied about with coils under main roads to provide inductive charging while suitors are driving

While that idea sounds cool, I wonder if the people who think about that realize how much freaking copper and other metals it would take to do even one major metro area with that sort of system under the road.

Such a system would be horrifically nightmarish to maintain and impossible to even install.

Sounds like it's time to revisit Tesla's energy broadcast experiments!

It looks like Sweden was planning a project to electrify a portion of their E20 highway to allow charging while driving, but I was unable to find any articles about it's completion. It may still be in the planning stages.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/05/09/sweden-is-building-the-worlds-first-permanent-electrified-road-for-evs-to-charge-while-dri

 SirDonlad wrote:

 Flinty wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh hey, look. They do it already.

https://www.fortum.com/media/2023/04/fortum-battery-recycling-opens-europes-largest-closed-loop-hydrometallurgical-battery-recycling-facility-finland

A headline does not make an argument.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c02602

The increased life expectancy is likely the result of battery treatment in use - failure from dendritic growth shorting happens as a result of output voltage being over material specific values (typically 4.something volts) so if you make sure the power draw is below that you inhibit dendritic growth.

So I skimmed the paper and the conclusion is that there is a lot of effective lithium battery recycling plants around the world already, with more being constructed and further research and development is underway. Which is the message I got from the headline. Basically, there is a nebulous set of engineers and scientists breaking physics through the application of cash. Huzzah. I can continue to leave the issue to those with more effective skill sets and I don’t need to know anything more about battery technology.

 Flinty wrote:
So I skimmed the paper and the conclusion is that there is a lot of effective lithium battery recycling plants around the world already, with more being constructed and further research and development is underway. Which is the message I got from the headline. Basically, there is a nebulous set of engineers and scientists breaking physics through the application of cash. Huzzah. I can continue to leave the issue to those with more effective skill sets and I don’t need to know anything more about battery technology.

You also need to get specific about which battery technology you are talking about. LiPON is a solid electrolytic type which offers much better charge density and is the type used by EV manufacturers because of that.
It has unique challenges compared to gel based electrolytic types covered in the research article.
All current methods of extraction sacrifice the electrolytic in order to recover the metal content from the 'black material' (cathodes or anodes).
Tesla is the pioneer of mechanical recovery of electrolytic material but that capability is dependent on not having any lithium dendritic growth because if you mechanically recover the solid electrolytic material with dendrtitic inclusions it makes the material unuseable as the lithium inclusion presents a preferential path for new dendritic growth meaning the shorting effect happens much sooner and at a lower critical voltage.
That makes the material unuseable for new cells unless you have a way of seperating the lithium nanostructures or garuanteeing their absence (so your EV has restricted output and range because the electrolytic material is unrecyclable if you let people use the maximum output).
Application of money is not going to affect that, only dialling back the performance and range of your EV will acheive that.
You cant pay physics to stop working.

Now read the article again, but actually consider this bit..

Several barriers exist to battery recycling with maximal efficiency, safety, environmental benefit, and economic return. (18)

In other words, the recycling process is being propped up with investment in the hope it might become the next great moneyspinner, hence this little gem..