3 ms·
I suppose you could have multiple charge cables, if the car was designed that way. You'd presumably need multiple charge ports and possibly multiple chargers (
by elihu 6y ago
I suppose you could have multiple charge cables, if the car was designed that way. You'd presumably need multiple charge ports and possibly multiple chargers (by which I mean the AC-to-DC or DC-to-DC converter built into the car) and for them to tolerate being connected in parallel with each other.
Just to be clear, you'd ordinarily have the cells themselves in series or a bunch of parallel groups in series to reach high voltages, and as far as the charger is concerned it's just one big battery with a single positive and a single negative terminal.
On the other hand, if you're suggesting balance charging where you have an individual connection with the charger between each cell, that's not really practical to do with large batteries because the current would be very high and the voltages very low, which, as far as cabling goes, is the worst-case scenario. Charging a single cell at 100 amps and low voltage requires basically the same size cable as charging a bunch of cells in series at 100 amps and high voltage. If you need a big, thick cable for each cell, that gets unwieldy very quickly.
Another unpractical option is to switch the battery into a single parallel group during charging and charge the whole group as if it was a single low-voltage high-amp-hour cell. That's unpractical for the same reason; low-voltage charging is an inefficient way to move energy around. Also, switching from series to parallel would require a lot of high-current contactors (basically, electro-mechanical relays), which are kind of expensive.