Forscher haben eine „Strukturbatterie“ gebaut und getestet, die das Chassis eines Geräts oder Elektrofahrzeugs mit Energie versorgt und so eine Menge Gewicht einspart | Sie könnte Smartphones so dünn wie Kreditkarten und Laptops mit der Hälfte des Gewichts ermöglichen und die Reichweite von Elektrofahrzeugen um 70 % steigern.
https://newatlas.com/technology/carbon-fiber-structural-battery-ev-range/
6 Comments
From the article: EVs rely heavily – pun intended – on large lithium-ion batteries to cover long distances. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology wondered if they could build a battery that doubles as the load-bearing material holding the car together, and shed some weight.
As part of their work on what they call ‘massless energy storage,’ the research team in Sweden has developed a battery made of a carbon fiber composite. It promises similar stiffness to aluminum, while also being capable of storing a fair bit of energy – enough to be used commercially.
The new battery design has an energy density of 30 Wh/kg, which is… not great by automotive standards. For reference, the 53 kWh battery pack in a Hyundai Ioniq 6 is rated at 153 Wh/kg (links to PDF).
But that’s the energy density of a battery pack sitting in a box; you’ve got to add on the weight of the entire car’s structural chassis to make it a fair comparison, as this carbon fiber structural battery is designed to replace the whole frame, shaving substantial weight off the overall vehicle, while freeing up space to boot.
EV and device manufacturers can do what they like with this new equation, either shooting for significantly lighter products, or filling the freed-up space back up with more cells to boost overall energy storage.
The results could be revolutionary in practice. “We have made calculations on electric cars that show that they could drive for up to 70 percent longer than today if they had competitive structural batteries,” says Asp.
Imagine going from adding your credit cards to your phone wallet to adding your phone to your credit card wallet
Would this presumably be safer in a crash than a single large battery?
Great in theory, but there is the wiring and the unique shaping of all these parts to consider – will that be worth the minor boost in store energy? Plus, these batteries cannot be replaced like a battery pack might, so longevity poses an issue.
And for cars, the design philosophy is around crumple zones, not rigid bodies. How do these energy-storing structural members behave when deformed? Even parts intended to be rigid are liable to be broken or bent in crashes.
They say in the article itself that this is a lab battery and although they formed a startup company in 2022 to drive commercialization, it’s still a lab battery. Big problem they still have is that the current electrolyte is not suitable for high power applications, so no automotive, cell phone, laptops, etc, basically anything that requires quick charging.
It’s an interesting research direction but don’t see the commercial potential here, there is too much possibility of damage to the battery if it’s used as a structural element, so it’s a massive fire risk. They dance around that issue, saying the semi-solid electrolyte is less flammable, whatever that means. They’ll need a fully solid electrolyte to eliminate the fire risk and I suspect that’s a tall order.
Would prefer a normal thickness phone and a longer battery life.