Abstract: The "mileage anxiety" has been plaguing the development of electric vehicle industry. Except loading batteries of high energy, consumers expect electric vehicles can be charged in 10 minutes, just as convenient and fast as fuel vehicles. Electric vehicles generally are charged between 0.5 and 2 hours as fast-charge, more than 2 hours as ordinary-slow-charging, and less than 10 minutes as called extreme-fast-charging (XFC). In this review, the science and engineering challenges in XFC, specifically for Li-ion batteries powered electric vehicles, are analyzed in terms of infrastructural equipment/facilities, battery pack/powertrain, battery thermal management, single cell design, battery chemistry and material and so on. This paper also analyzes the gap between technical status quo and XFC requirements, clarifies the technical difficulties that need to be solved in extremely fast charging. Although extremely fast charging has not yet been achieved, this paper proposes future R&D directions.

Key words: lithium ion batteries, electric vehicle, extreme fast charge, science and engineering, development trend