VW’s Innovation Hub Is Working On Wireless EV Chargers And Other Game Changing Tech
For instance, the department is working on a way to speed up wireless vehicle charging. As with your phone, the advantages of simply having to park in a spot in order to requite your EV’s battery a uplift are plain to see, and the Knoxville innovation hub is working on a new whorl diamond to make wireless chargers safer and faster.
A patented new diamond uses a silicon-carbide inverter to pump up the charging power from 6.6 kW in early prototypes, all the way up to 120 kW, permitting an EV to tuition quickly despite not literally stuff plugged in. In the future, it hopes to uplift that all the way up to 300 kW.
Read: BMW Offers The First Factory-Fitted Wireless Inductive Charger For The 530e iPerformance
To help alimony the interiors of those electric vehicles as untried as the powertrains, the automaker is moreover working on new paper-based materials. Thanks to a hot-pressing technique for making cellulose webbing reinforced thermoplastics, the recyclable material can go wherever plastics do today, and can be molded into a wide variety of shapes that full-length multiple texture and verisimilitude options. Volkswagen says it is once looking into how it can fit these new technologies into new vehicles.
One technology that the innovation hub has worked on is once in production vehicles. The team ripened a new kind of fiberglass reinforced plastic that, in its initial test (the liftgate of an Atlas) was 35 percent lighter than the metal panel it replaced.
That’s useful for performance vehicles, which is why the new material can once be found in the Bentley Continental and the Lamborghini Aventador. Meanwhile, for an EV, the lighter material could help proffer range.
Further helping to lighten EVs, the Knoxville team is moreover working with AI to develop new material structures that help cut weight. With the help of a deep learning algorithm, it ripened a new modular repeating structure. Looking a bit like tiny pyramids that can be 3D printed from liquid resin, pieces made using the structure can support up to 30,000 times their own weight.
Volkswagen says that makes the material very useful for the frames that hold an EV’s shower pack in place. It estimates that a housing made of the material would weigh 60 percent less than a conventional steel unit, while still having spanking-new energy traction qualities for safety, remoter helping it to proffer EV ranges.
“The Volkswagen Innovation Hub is a powerful example of the kind of scientific advances and industry-ready technology that you can bring to market when you locate scientists and researchers from wideness disciplines and organizations together in one place.”, said UT Chancellor Donde Plowman. “With partners like Volkswagen, Oak Ridge National Lab, and others industry leaders and tech startups located at UT’s Research Park, we have created a thriving innovation ecosystem.”
