Electric vehicle technology has made significant progress so far, and one of the things that can help this progress more than anything else is the inverter. The inverter is a very important component inside an electric vehicle, as the motor and battery in any electric drive system are completely useless without it. <\/p>\n\n
British company Equipmake, which makes the innovative, high-speed Ampere electric motor, has developed an inverter that is smaller, lighter and more efficient, and can extract more energy from an electric car’s battery.<\/p>\n\n
Alternating current (AC), on the other hand, changes direction periodically. The alternating current in UK household electricity supplies changes 50 times per second (a frequency of 50 Hz). Almost all electric motors in electric vehicles use an industrial, three-phase, high-voltage form of alternating current. <\/p>\n\n
Without something in between, the battery can’t power the motor or recover electrical energy from it, which is where the inverter comes in. The inverter converts direct current to alternating current to power the motor, and does the opposite when regenerative braking is activated. <\/p>\n\n
The inverter must convert electrical current approximately a thousand times per second, and during this time, some energy is lost and wasted. Typically, the building blocks of inverters are silicon power transistors, called insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), which switch current up to 20,000 times per second (20 kHz). <\/p>\n\n
EquipMic’s inverter is based on a new type of silicon carbide MOSFET, or metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, that can switch electrical current at up to 80 kHz. Not only is higher switching speed important for driving the faster, smaller electric motors used in electric vehicles, but power also improves as switching speed increases. <\/p>\n\n
The technology is currently not widely used due to its high cost, but the new MOSFET-based inverter is not only efficient, but also smaller and lighter. Typically, the power-to-weight ratio of a conventional IGBT inverter is 40 kW\/kg, while the new MOSFET design can increase this to 100 kW\/kg, which is a huge feat considering the extensive effort being made to optimize electric vehicles and increase their range. <\/p>\n\n
The time required to fast charge an electric vehicle depends very much on the optimum battery temperature, which is typically between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius. If the battery needs to warm up or cool down after charging, the fast charging time will be longer. One method under development is to bring the battery to the optimum temperature along the way to charging (as programmed in the satellite navigation system), thereby shortening the charging time as much as possible. <\/p>\n\n
<\/p>\n\n
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British company Equipmec has unveiled a small, lightweight inverter based on a silicon carbide metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor that will improve electric vehicle performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":12772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2009],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solar-panels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12770"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12773,"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12770\/revisions\/12773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knggreen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}