Success! High-speed wireless charging gets real at Purdue University

For the first time in the US, a battery-electric semi truck has successfully been charged at highway speeds, and without wires thanks to a new, patent-pending system designed by a team of Purdue University engineers with support from Cummins.

First announced last April as a joint project between Purdue and Cummins, the project electrified a quarter-mile long segment of US Highway 52/US Highway 231 in West Lafayette, Indiana. More significantly, the team successfully delivered 190 kilowatts (!?) of charging power to a Class 8 electric semi truck while it was traveling at a confirmed 65 mph.

“Two of the big barriers to electric vehicle adoption, at least to the public, are range anxiety — ‘Oh, my gosh, where am I going to charge the battery on this car?’ — and the second thing is cost,” explains John Haddock, a professor in Purdue University’s Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering. “And a lot of that cost in electric vehicles is driven by the size of the battery packs that they have to have in order to get you that 250-to-300 mile range. With this system, you’d be able to drive your vehicle down the road and it would charge the battery.”

Purdue’s patent-pending system involves installing transmitter coils in specially dedicated lanes within the road itself. Those coils send power to a set of receiver coils installed beneath the truck’s frame in such a way that, the university claims, demonstrates key technology in the wireless charging arena that could help drive down the costs of building electrified highways for all electric vehicles to use.

If the technology lives up to its promise, it’s a huge deal – which is why everyone involved is crowing about the nearly 200 kW of high-speed charging that’s already been achieved.

Righteous pride

“Cummins is proud to play a role in this initiative by successfully adapting a prototype Class 8 battery-electric truck to integrate with Purdue’s high-power dynamic wireless power transfer system,” said John Kresse, chief technology engineer at Cummins. “The on-road testing went exceptionally well, thanks to strong collaboration between our teams. With its high power and promising cost structure, this technology represents a practical, and potentially game-changing, solution for the future of on-highway commercial transportation.”

In addition to Cummins, the university partnered with AECOM, White Construction, Inc., and PC Krause and Associates, Inc. on developing and implementing various parts of the system.

SOURCE | IMAGES: Purdue.