Written by Duncan Nicol

Batteries have been around for a very long time, but it‘s only in recent years that significant investment has been thrown at the challenge of making batteries more efficient and better suited to emerging applications such as home energy storage and electric vehicles. Batteries can also perform an important role in managing peak demand from the grid as demonstrated recently by Tesla in Australia.

One of the big challenges facing battery technology in the automotive sector is the ability to charge them quickly and make long distance travel more practical. Rapid charging brings its own challenges especially to the connector technology which is an area Phoenix Contact have been very active in over the years. A typical charging cable deployed in the electric vehicle charging infrastructure is required to perform a minimum of 10,000 mating cycles. To put that into context, if you plugged your phone in to charge once a day it would take 27 years to reach 10,000 mating cycles and I doubt anyone has a charging cable that is 27 years old.

Phoenix Contact has been working on the next generation of CCS connectors for High Powered Charging (HPC) with the ability to deliver 500 amps and shorten charge times to just a few minutes. As the amps increase so does the operating temperature and so the challenge for HPC is heat management. This is achieved by actively cooling the cable and contacts during the charging cycle which in turn increase charging efficiencies.

We have also developed 400 amp battery swap connectors for use in electric buses to minimise operational downtime. The technical challenges to achieving this are considerable and require the connector to be both vibration resistant during operation and provide tolerance compensation during automatic mating with a requirement for over 10,000 mating cycles.

Home energy storage is another emerging application for batteries and complements solar to deliver the energy when needed and not just when the sun is shining. This is an area of technology where more conventional solutions are applicable and we offer a wide range of solutions. PCB connectors are not always considered for high current applications but we offer solutions up to 232 amps with various connection technologies.

For more information on our solutions for battery storage please visit us at the Battery Tech Expo on 15^th of March 2018 at the International Centre Telford.

For more information contact:

Direct Tel: +44 (0)7799 072 059

Email: dnicol@phoenixcontact.com