Imagine an electric car that’s lightweight and fast, and can go for hundreds of miles on a single charge. This car would not have a battery pack to weigh it down. Its batteries would be part of its body. Structural batteries have been around at least since the 2000s when the U.S. military designed the first ones out of carbon fiber, which is a conductive material. It is also notoriously lightweight, and things can be built from it, including car bodies.
Tesla’s Elon Musk announced at the company’s Battery Day it was going to start incorporating the batteries into the chassis of the cars. It was time to do away with the “skateboard” pack and mold the battery cells into the body of the vehicle. Musk called it revolutionary. Scientists who have been working on structural batteries for years must have rolled their eyes.
“He’s essentially doing something that we did 10 years ago,” Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London and the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, told Wired. “What we’re doing is going beyond what Elon Musk has been talking about. There are no embedded batteries. The material itself is the energy storage device.”
Greenhalgh is one of the researchers pursuing the path of structural batteries that are not a separate object from the car they are put in but rather a component of it because the battery is essentially the material, from which the body—or any other part—is made.
Structural batteries most simply consist of two layers of carbon fiber polymers, one with a negative and the other with a positive charge for anode and cathode, and with an insulation layer of fiberglass between them. The material can be used to build the whole body of a car, theoretically.Read More..
Source : oilprice
