Why You Should Be Excited About This Battery Breakthrough From Sweden!
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- We're in something of a golden age for battery development - thanks to Tesla's Gigafactories and new battery cell designs, countless solid state battery projects, and new chemistries that are more ethical, use can last longer, and outperform the generations of cells that went before.
But in Sweden, a team of engineers at the Chalmers University have come up with a new breakthrough - a new type of structural battery that can be your vehicle's body panels - and battery!
We ask why it's so special, explain why we're excited, and postulate where this battery tech could end up in the future -- assuming it reaches commercial viability!
Read the press release for yourself at: news.cision.co...
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Presenter: Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield
Script: Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield
Produced: Transport Evolved
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The Boulevard of Broken Battery dreams are littered with 20 years of "breakthrough batteries" that never left the lab. I'm not surprised. It's good to know about these batteries but we also need to keep it real.
Gotta keep the funding and government grants coming every year so it will never leave the lab
But! Tesla himself, was a master of Try and Fail, then Fail Better! The naysayers really should go back and look at how many rockets crashed and burned extensively with the Mercury Astronauts watching! Persistence and Bravery won out as it will eventually do so again! Just cuz they haven’t been loud doesn’t mean they weren’t and are now, diligently using whatever resources are available to them! From the late 50’s and wild 60’s through now and into the future!
You'd be surprised at the number of research results of such projects find their way to 'regular' batteries.
I was just going to write just that. Been following the "revolutionary" and "amazing discovery" "commercial available in 5 years" battery BS for a long time.
Even the batteries that make it to the market like the salt water home battery that should be easier, better and cheaper turns out heavier, way bigger and more expensive that the Li-Ion counterpart ... with no long term tests or guarantee ...
You are very perceptive, and that is very true!
First of all, it is truly a publicity stunt!
Second, investors will not get their ROIs, so forget those cars!
If I would have a dollar every time a "breakthrough" is in the making, I would be a billionaire by now!
Let's not exaggerate... You'd have a few thousand.
@@Thorocious Haha! Ok, fair enough!
There's actually a way of making a dollar everytime a new breakthrough is announced: it's called journalism.
@@sufurt782 haha
Nikki, you are fast. I’m Swedish and saw this on a Swedish tech-site only yesterday, and you have allready made a video about it!
@@cofal79 yeah I remember seeing this clip 5-6 years ago ua-cam.com/video/svA2x-o9Myo/v-deo.html
@@gearhead_J I checked out the old Volvo video, and it appears as thought the strength of their battery material was largely achieved by sandwiching it between carbon fiber layers ...not exactly the same as I see here.
My fear with this “spread over” type of battery in a vehicle is with the ordinary little dents we have to get fixed. Bodywork is already expensive, imagine what a door filled with batteries would cost to replace!
Yeah, but then you can get a horse and buggy... no doors to ding there :-)
Exactly. At first look it seems awesome...but I don't know...this seems like something I would shy away from spending $25k or more on...
Although...flexible and self-healing batteries may become a thing. With nano-tech improving the way it is, this may become viable really soon.
As I understand it they envision it to be used more for other things than cars.
Exactly.
Sounds great superficially, but in reality this will be a nightmare in terms of long term serviceability unless revolutionary improvements to serviceability are made.
I agree. It’s usually the case in these “breakthroughs,” it works in the lab but they don’t think of the difficulties at each level such as mass manufacturing, repair, recycling, among other things.
Yeah autos become disposable when their batteries need service, don’t they?
A small parking accident might become a nightmare.
This might be useful in some hidden parts of a car, but I'd prefer it not being the body shell.
I would assume most this would do is stuff like be used as load bearing central platform, with minimal protective cladding. Instead of current setup, where there is a heavy pack box around the battery cells to be load bearing. The battery box would still be load bearing and might not look outside that different, but crucially more of the weight of the pack box is the battery. Since the batteries are bearing the weight, instead of current setup of battery pack box protecting the cells from having to bear strains. There almost certainly would be outer skin of some material around just for sake of environmental and safety reasons.
So battery box, that would be have to be handled delicately when empty or it would crumble. However full of battery cells..... Super stiff and works as the main load bearing chassis between front and back axles.
@@aritakalo8011 Unless the battery bolts directly into the frame, the battery box will still need to be strong enough to transfer loads from the frame it is bolted on to the cells, so the battery box will still have plenty of structural integrity on its own. Unless the whole thing is made into a solid epoxied block, the only way to make cells contribute to chassis integrity is by actually having the top and bottom covers operate as tension-compression planes and using the cells to keep them from buckling into each other, which can be done with conventional cells too.
Awesome video as always. quick note 4860 cells (@1:35ish) --> 4680 cells. But we know what you meant!
Script bothers -Nikki.
@@transportevolved I was like...wait...what? But great video! Love this subject. My old materials smiled!
@@transportevolved Can you image this product on the Aptera?
The cell is the vehicle is an interesting take on an old slogan. I do worry about serviceability as mentioned elsewhere here, and I also worry about engineers (actually the bean counters that control them) deciding they understand all the loads better than they really do, with potentially catastrophic results.
It's less than 3rd of aluminium, not sure how much use that is
I don't see this technology in EVs at all. The energy density is too low and production costs too high. Even for things like laptops or tabletts - if you remove all the electronic - how much does the empty chasis weight? Next to nothing! So replacing it with a "structural battery" with such a low energy density will result in a way to small capacity. But for some niche applications like in the space industry it could really have benefits in the not so distant future.
I am an engineer living off grid and new techs are allways interesting! BUT what a pain to recycle this structural battery 'sandvich' after its life cycle! Hope they will present a solution to that as well.
I was thinking the exact thing. A benefit of the current design is that the batteries today can be removed for repair, refurbishment or recycling. I imagine there is a way to solve this, or rather for this to be viable it has to be solved, otherwise we will be adding to our mountains of waste.
I think the best solution would be to use frame style structure with modular, somewhat easily removed and replaced connectors. I think using it as a external body panel/structural member is just too much of a liability, in the practical sense.
If used as an external weight bearer, suddenly anything but the very mildest of collisions becomes quite the electrical and chemical hazard.
With my idea, I think the likely result would be that any vehicle with outdated or worn out batteries would be shipped or sold to a rebuilder, who simply removes the body panels and drivetrain, then inspects the reused components and installs the new frame/battery pieces from standard sized components they have in stock.
The good/bad news is this favors the design of bulky, squarish, body-on-frame pick-ups and SUV's, the larger of which already have more or less standard frame dimensions in the US.
My thoughts also,. They should have kept the "battery swap", just to allow a replacement battery. Now they are going with the iphone, that if the battery goes bad, just throw the whole car away. I was thinking that this was some misdirection from tesla to lead other down a bad path, but elon continually says that its his goal to share everything....I'm really disappointed...
Same thinking here my fellow good engineers. A 2nd life for batteries are needed. Imagine a of pile of inefficient batteries being dumb to poorer countries... same issues with the plastic waste.. shipped to other nations.
this
I can't help but imagine how difficult and expensive it would be to repair an EV whose body structure is also it's battery!
I was thinking about that too but I have seen other solid-state batteries and they were cutting them in half and piercing them without any issues.
I imagine if they bolt the battery/frame/understructure to the rest of the car it won't be that complicated at all. I imagine if they weld it together that would be a problem.
I imagine it will be almost impossible to use. Never, ever does an innovation like this come without a significant advantage for the builder: usually making the consumer have to buy a new product more often.
@@TheAllMightyGodofCod I agree. But as soon as two builders do this, they will compete via lower cost...hopefully.
Automobiles are much safer today thanks to having parts that absorb energy by crumpling. I doubt we'd want those parts also being batteries.
Transportation aside, the availability of the 2/4 wooden studs for home construction has greatly increased in price. So you say, how will we construct affordable homes? What if the walls and roofs of our home were also batteries?
@Bainsworth There is also talk of making bricks into batteries. USA housing construction technology is way behind in comparison to other developed countries. But as said, wood has become very expensive. I think the use of carbon fiber has potential and if that is the case then making it a battery is an option. It would be a real "Power Wall".
I doubt that those sort of walls will be cheaper than wooden ones anytime soon. How could one associate affordability in that context???
Musk has already addressed that question with his generating solar roof tile !
@@linmal2242 If I'm not mistaken, the question was: "What if the walls and roofs of our home were also batteries?"
What have solar tiles to do with it? Some use every chance to publicly praise their lord, no matter the context...
@@nachtaktivster
You have not priced the cost of wood lately. If we take the standard middle class suburban home as an example using traditional balloon-frame stud construction there is a lot of wood involved. Watch you will see the horror stories in a few months.
Affordable housing is the flip side of BEV's. As I said housing construction in this country will have to adapt. My fancy is: highly insulated buildings, 3d printed masonry walls, carbon fiber roof frames with appropriate PV, recycled material internal walls. "Batteries not included!!!"
5:40, The higher the modulus; the less an object will deform within the elastic range. The likelihood the deformation is elastic is not affected by the value of the modulus. Sorry but the engineer and OCD in me just had to say something.
Imagine it they combined that battery with a top layer of thin film solar, then use that product to build aeroplane wings and fuselage.
Solar only gives enough power per surface area to fly an ultralight aircraft with over-sized wings. If you slap solar cells on a 737, they need to be rugged enough to survive 200+km/h strikes from everything planes run into during a typical flight or they'll spend more time requiring maintenance than providing power. Covering the fuselage with solar cells is also problematic for maintenance since you'd have to strip cells to inspect it.
Where do you work!? PROMOTION!
But what if they combined it like Sono on its Sion?
@@stuartlark6441 Sions don't fly.
They could then run the plan's AC with it. So what?
Can you imagine the cost of repairing your car after a little dent !!!?, if cars want to be environmentally friendly they need to be repairable we need to be able to keep them on the road for longer, i think car design is heading in the wrong direction !!!?.
Exactly my point👍
If they get warm when charged, cats can warm themselves on the bonnet again...
Thats how they get ran over. The strays still sleep under cars here to this day but most people are using good ol gasolina!
@@Sentient.A.I. I have a solution: get a dog instead
@@samautrey I have a dog. I am talking about strays man @R E L A X A N D R E A D •
🔥🐈🔥😸🔥🐈⬛🔥
And how do you replace the batteries in a car when they are integrated into the frame/body of the vehicle. Batteries in packs can be swapped out.
Bingo. Just like tesla, buy a new one.
Wow you were doing so well until. 5:39
"The higher the measurement of stiffness the less likely something is to undergo elastic deformation" I think you intended to say plastic deformation, but more importantly, I don't think there is any correlation between young's modulus and the yield strength. In fact, steel always has the same young's modulus, but has a wide range yield strengths based on details of chemistry, heat treatment, and strain history.
It’s a worry with more integrated batteries, it’ll reduce the serviceability and worse, the recyclability of the battery/product. We’ve already seen this with mobile phones that now get thrown away/replaced instead of fixed when the battery degrades.
If these batteries are eventually used to form body parts of a car.. what happens if I gets a shunt from another car.. before you know it, it’ll be a financial write off for fairly a minor impact in a current ev. Not very environmentally friendly having to replace a car instead if just fixing it. Also, what about the projects that use battery second life.. or did/do those project only exist to help “recycle” current battery technology. Lots and lots of questions....
Funny how there are always "glass-half-empty people" who - in spite of almost always lacking any expertise in the area - have negative things to say about any new technology. Let's assume, until proven wrong, that the very smart people who came up with this invention (unlike you who, I'm guessing, have invented exactly zero new battery technologies) are also smart enough to figure out solutions to the imaginary problems that you "free internet thinkers" (read: uneducated amateurs) come up with in your lonely chambers.
Agree. Not to speak of short circuiting the whole thing at a minor impact and the whole hull goes up in flames. Carbon fibre burns well.
@@seybertooth9282 👍 iPhone are 100% recycled. Apple actually designed a robotic disassembly machine
You are right.. It is probably not for cars.. but there are lots of other use cases like planes as suggested, where it would be. Space satellites could be awesome too. laptops and phones of course.. it is a really nice tech.
@@Mr_Seppo Yes, just google "copper thieve electrocution"
So when the battery "chassis" need replacement, you'll need to buy a new car? Yet again another throw out, buy new product? EV's are not worth it for atleast 10-15 years. If you need to replace motors, screen and other vital part within 4 years, the technology is not yet there..
1000kg of this material would give you a 24kwh battery. Essentially a first gen Leaf without a battery pack. Could be really amazing at even just a slightly higher energy density. I'd love to make some things with this.
No because a lot of this weight is not from the chassis. Things like seats, stearing wheel, air conditioner, electric cables, wheels & tires etc. can't be replaced by a "structural battery".
Then somebody rear ends your car, which would usually lead to some crumbles in the trunk and a broken light, wreaks your car.
@@VolkerHett The structural battery will not be part of the crumble zones. It will be a part of the zones of your vehicle where everything should be as intact as possible to save your life in an accident, and it will part of what holds everything together every single day, hence "structural".
@@Arpedk Just my thinking. But that's far from the ton of metal in a car besides the drivetrain. And then we need it to be a lot stronger than it is now. And even stronger when we think about what might happen to physically damaged LiIon cells.
@@VolkerHett I think you are overthinking it. Lets say a normal car needs 400 kg of steel just for its structural properties.
Then when you have a structural battery weighing in at 600 kg but it adds 300 kg of structural propertied. Then your total weight will become 600 kg (battery) + 100 kg (additional structural steel) = 700 kg. So your battery+structural ends up weighing 300 kg less than otherwise, and the battery only adds 300 kg of extra weight to the car.
Everything else in the car will be not change as you have the same structural strength as before.
You may also in the first end up with a battery that doesn't need any extra structural elements and thus a 600 kg battery may only end up with an additional weight of 200 kg (600 kg battery - 400 kg structural steel) as the extra steel in no longer needed. Compared to an ICE vehicles this may end of weighing less as the ICE vehicle still needs to add a gas tank, engine and transmission. At the end of this decade battery electric vehicles will have the same or less weight than an ICE vehicle.
Well a Cessna Skyhawk weighs 760kg empty of which 130kg is the engine. No idea what all the fittings would come to but let's guess a very conservative 80kg. That leaves a bare weight of 550kg. At 24 wh/kg that gives us 13.2 kw/h of energy. Woot.
and then lightning ...
So when the battery dies or breaks but everything else works, it is time to buy a new car. Sounds like an Apple product.
Best EV lithium ion batteries that are mass produced are still at just .3 kWh per kg. Gasoline and diesel is at 13 kWh per kg. For aviation, batteries needs to get a lot better.
The "However ..." starts at 10:45. Recommend that viewers start there.
Cheers utubers have to stretch it clips to make more money hence the waffle, honestly could have covered this in four minutes flat. Too much waffle and I tend to switch off.
"structural batteries" Aka: non-user replaceable... I'll be taking a big fat pass on this 😅
Current products are so heavily developed/engineered that user repairable is rapidly going obsolete. Getting to the point where keeping every garage stocked with the required tools is more wasteful than designing products for recycling.
@@lengould9262 here's a story on repairability - this guy hit some road debris, which damaged a plastic belly pan and punctured a coolant line - Took it to a Tesla shop and they told him $16grand to replace the battery (ended up taking it to a shop that fixed it for $700) who jalopnik.com/tesla-quotes-16-000-to-repair-model-3-independent-sho-1847281796
@@peterkratoska3681 Yes, that is like 'surgery' for fixing an artery for cooling the battery! How perceptive are those guys in the mechanical shops!
On the other hand, how rigid are those minds of Tesla shop! They are knowing only the 'money-making mode' where they can make the most money in the shortest time. How efficient, the process of using what has been already designed, to replace the main item which got impacted but not in the best interest of the buyer.
More power to them, I say!
These would be great for prosthetics as well, lowering the weight of the prosthesis helping all the Edward Elrics of the world grow taller.
And here I was thinking planes, imagine a light weight electric aircraft where the wings are both solor cells and batteries. Honestly this is a concept that could benefit many industries.
Problem with load bearing is what happens after 8 to 10 years? How do you replace some of the battery's?
Good point.. a new modular design with redundancy built in could be an awesome side effect technology.
Excellent 👍
Building structure's as well when it becomes cheap enough. Then Power Wall will be literal 😁
Cheers
Thank you for an interesting and well presented run down. May I assume that the battery life also becomes the vehicle's life ?
throw away cars
You should put the number in the screen, it would help the information assimilation
High stiffness means cracking...
Very cool tech! (heja Sverige 😊)
I see Elon, buying into this very soon...
OK, so every bare metal spot is an arc risk?
Of course I'm kidding but seriously how would one secure such a vehicle to prevent fire after an accident?
Her inner nerd is so self evident here. I always thought you belonged in a lab coat and not doing UA-cam ;) Additive manufacturing is opening new doors as to what mass production can achieve these days. EI, Tesla's Giga Press is additive manufacturing as are most of the processes used in the manufacturing of the rockets for SpaceX and Jet Turbines at GE.
No, it is not! Tesla's Giga Press is just die casting after all. Die casting at impressive huge scale - but still die casting. Please educate yourself.
@@nachtaktivster it is still a form of additive manufacturing that did not exist. The material sciences to enable casting at this scale without deviations has never been possible until now. The metallurgy available did not allow it. They had to create that at Tesla. That is why the company making these machines had never built a system of this size or capacity. The metallurgy made it useless to go beyond what they had done previously.
@@davefroman4700 Ah ok, it is additive manufacturing because material science was involved? Got it! What a fool I am...
Hi. I would be interested to see medical prosthetics developers make use of this structural come battery for leg or hand prosthetics particularly for children where weight is a major constraint to acceptance for day long usage.
Laboratory hype? Next!
Wake me up when they go to production
As long as the new ideas keep coming, and investors fund them, we'll win eventually.
Mmm what do I think? If the entire car is the battery, what happens if you need to get the battery replaced? I can see it working in niche markets, but I'm not so sure about EV's? Unless it's a cheap throw away car? Thanks for the video!!! 👍
Virtually everything in a car is consumable. For historic vehicles, people may need to replace the battery, like someone replacing an engine, but for the most part, the batteries should far exceed a vehicle's lifetime, and not be of concern to most customers.
When the differential fell out of the bottom of my car, in principle it was fixable but in practice it meant that my car had reached the right hand side of the bath tub curve of reliability. Car designers design cars for a certain lifetime at which point all the bits will start failing. The battery unreliability thing comes from experience from mobile phones where the design lifetime is three years. Phone maker’s could make longer lasting batteries for their phones but then they would not sell as many phones.
@@MRTOWELRACK fair point. As Electrical Engineer I just can't stomach non repairable things though. I'm too old school lol.
@@jeffreythomas815 Ideally, automakers won't be using lithium ion batteries for too long with the emergence of other chemistries, like solid state.
Some flex can be a good thing as long as you don't go past the yeald point in youngs modulus of elasticity. Very interesting.
in other words; it is fine as long as you do not break it ;-)
@@jyvben1520 dead right 👍
Don't want to snap. Carbide is stronger but cracks. Steel is not as strong, but will bend when pushed past it's limit.
"Elastic Defamation" -- Nikki's approach to criticizing bounders like Nikola and Lordstown!
Need to get hold of one of these cells and test them out
Does this mean a damaged or worn out battery and you just throw the car away.
Yep that’s what it sounds like. That’s palatable so long as they’re recyclable and affordable. I mean EVs would have to cost a fraction of what they cost now for consumers to accept that risk. This breakthrough has a lot to deliver. Im still seeing solid state as a more viable holy grail
So if the battery fails (which is the most probable) We will be force to change the structural part? ( chassis, roof , doors,...
Does not sound good
I agree that’s a problem, but current gen batteries last longer than the car so probably not a big problem.
@@peterbrown6453Good point, but mixing functionalities may lead to extra costs when repairing.
Anyway if the cost of the structural composite becomes very low this is not a problem.
Then we have the recycling issue.
Soo. This with an outer coating of solar panels. Perfect.
Yes please, Im a dreamer not an engineer, so its luckely not up to us to make it work 🤣
Okay wow, 1st off this is my 1st video with u guys and kudos, the presenter was knowledgeable, likable, and presented the info in which a non techy person could understand. Now to the video, hella cool way to make a battery. Wonder what an apple phone would look like. My wrist wouldn’t hurt from the weight lol
One of the most fascinating developments I've learned of in a long time. Your caution, about how gradual may be the transition from lab to commercial product, is understandable, but I expect this technology to develop quickly: The appeal of load-bearing materials doubling as batteries is SO strong: big money is probably being spent, as I type this, on catching up on, improvising beyond, this technology. When that much goes into a project (as went recently into vaccine development), "miracles" (impressive achievements) can happen.
I wouldn´t expect mass use. As mentioned in the video, this is not a new idea and research into making for example a car chassis battery has been done before. The problem other then energy density will be price. EV makers are trying to make unified cells for their cars for a good reason. A battery that has to match structure of dozens of different products makes sense only in niche use where the cost is secondary and can never get close in price to cells made by billions. But hopefully it will be developed for drones/planes and other uses where every gram counts.
Hmmm... advanced advancements
Hmm, I'm getting bored of these 'breakthroughs'... None of them have come to market in a decade. Tesla's new cell is just a different design of roughly the same composition. Where's solid state? 5x capacity?
Great. Now, not only do we have to worry about thermal runaway, and explosive battery issues in serious impacts which breach the battery enclosure, but now also major battery shorting and possible runaway resulting from something as minor as a push bike rider running into a door or other panel. ...AWESOME!!! 🤔🧐😮💨
Unfortunately the elephant in the room was not addressed. All chemistry batteries will age. So at some point a vehicle built with such a tech would be a throw away. Meaning you can't just replace/upgrade the batteries you have to dispose of the whole vehicle at some point. This is not a good tech since it promotes waste assuming recycling is not 100%.
I can't see this being adopted in cars. Wearables and other niche products, sure, but not cars.
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LoL.. Solid state batteries, Samsung, use silver and thus expensive.. Structural? How about removable and lease-able; quick change.. ??? there is really no advance, just hype. Load bearing.. insane.. they stretch, they fail, they burn.. Expensive Human Incinerators ..basic chemistry.
Great 👍 looking forward to the all toxic fossil free battery 🔋 Flax and natural resions 😄🌏Next big sustainable leap buzz Knapp-Fisher Buzzofftoxic #buzzofftoxic #ConscienceLand #endwar #ChangeWednesday #nonprofitleadership #buzzforpriminester
Chalmers Uni are amazing on both battery and solar tech. Also, you might want to check out Oxis Energy in Oxford who are focusing on aerospace and marine which are at 450w/kg for Li-S. Granted these might be more pricey geared for aircraft, but eventually it could make its way into automotive. And,, its neighbour, Oxford PV doing amazing work to commercialise perovskite PV which will reduce cost and can be embedded in composites. Happy days for Aptera, Lightyear, and Sono. The body as battery will be brilliant for marine sector with the hulls of boats.
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A Camry body is 1500kg. At 24 Wh that's 36 kWh. Let's call that 120 miles (200 km) of range. Just estimates. Yes the body could be lighter but most other cars heavier bodies. Also reducing the body weight reduces the amount the chassis could store but makes the vechicles more efficent. The tech could be more or less efficient out of the lab. So all just swag but in general, the structal battery could be up to 25% of a long range (500 mile/800 km) EV.
Hi, dear Mrs.Gordon-Bloomfield , dear Transport Evolved Team! Your videos about battery chemistry are very interresting, I like to show these... We have just the problem to find a renewable chemistry for batteries of the future with low environnemental impacts and that we could recycling these with conventional methods.... In my opinion Manganese/Zink or a isotope (nucleoides) based chemistry are better than Solid State chemistry based on polymers and graphene... But it is the "output current" they will be deliver and the charging time (input current) for the most important things for quick charge technologies... In the other hand another technology will be the supercapacitor developped by Skeleton Technologies that will be a very suitable opportunity...
Wow! What an excting new way to increase and excellerate the depreciation of an essential big ticket purchase item! Exchange it's most critically important consumable and therefore replacable component with a non replacable and structurally critical component. That way, when the component fails or is depleted, all you do is replace the whole high purchase item instead of the failed or depleted and recyclable component. Yeah. That's an exellent idea.
It's highly unlikely as strong as you can make aluminium, or a composite, at same or even lower cost, so you will need more structural mass.
All things considered, it will be very difficult to make as strong and light and cheap, as producing structure and batteries separately.
24 Wh in laboratory, and assumed multiple times better with further development, will mean far less than 24 Wh in first generation of usable application.
But, even att 24 Wh, or even 50 Wh per kg, you wont save weight if you have to increase the weight of the vehicle body just a few percent, compared to optimizing the body, and using "conventional" batteries.
Also, take a car like a model S, a bit more than 2000 kg. Take away the battery, seats and everything else that cant be made in to those new batteries, and you have a lot less than 1000 kg. That means a lot less than 24 kWh at 24 Wh/kg, in a car the size of a model S, it will not be worth the hassle. Common easily produced cells will probably have more than 500 Wh/kg before that becomes a product.
In electric airplanes? It's a compromise, you can't get as good strength for the same weight and incorporate a battery function. You'd need an insignificant weight penalty, which is not likely to be achievable. Unless the energy density gets decent, which is also unlikely to happen.
It wont be cheap to produce, other than possibly in flat sheets. Also, having the batteries exposed, not a good idea. Exposed to heat, cold and physical damage, those things will reduce function, life expectancy, and safety.
I have one major problem with battery powered cars, well actually two. Until all power is produced by renewable sources, you are merely transporting the pollution caused by ICE cars in cities to the more rurally sited power stations. The second problem I see is if you have a 6 figure income and the ability to reduce your cost with tax deductions, then an expensive battery status symbol is doable. The average mug who wants a cheap car that has a few luxuries and can be used for the occasional rural jaunt, then you will be walking in future. Get a car that sells for $US20, 000 and 100% renewable power and I agree it will be a goer, until then 80% of car owners will drive ICE.
This is a cool tech, but even at 100 Wh / kg, it most likely will not compare favorably with structural battery packs using 4680 cells or prismatic cells in 10 years. It seems terribly heavy for our ever increasing energy needs, and in this case, rather than focusing on energy density, an added bonus, we really need to compare the weight and strength of these panels to the weight and strength of the panels it would replace, for instance in planes or trailers that have a high panel surface area.
Coupling these structural battery panels with thin film photovoltaics would be even cooler. No wonder they're partnering with the Swedish NASA, they'll need the kind of highly efficient multi-junction solar cells used in satellites... ;-)
Pricing will also dictate the types of application for such panels.
An idea. Make structural walls. put them in buildings... say the partition wall between your kitchen and your pantry. your energy autonomy solved. You're welcome.
Don't need 1000 miles we can only hope for 300 miles & a EV car cheaper much cheaper thelan £25,000
Think you're math is way, way off ... not even close!
24 w/h per Kg means for a small ev with 30Kw battery equivalent of this one is 1250 Kg! That is probably the total weight of the whole car.
I'm seeing quite a few Comments regarding structural batteries in EVs and the problem of accident damage being non-repairable...
But why assume that the battery would form the outermost skin of the vehicle? If it formed the chassis and sub-frames which were then clad in shock-mounted 'ablative' body panels, only an extremely serious impact would damage the inner battery.
Think of how infrequently a petrol tank is affected in an 'ordinary' crash. There's no reason why battery components forming the floor, seat bases, boot lining and roof structure couldn't be similarly protected.
A car with a structural battery would be no different from one of today's cars, where it's accepted that a severe enough collision will result in a wrecked monocoque and an insurance write-off.
Repairing minor dents and scrapes in doors and wings would be pretty much the same as it is now.
It might even be better, if the outer panels are made from recycled plastic and not steel or something stupidly fragile and expensive like carbon-fibre.
I think some peeps are just miffed because this interesting idea is one that doesn't have Ego Muskrat writ large across it. That's all the reason his disciples need to knock it down.
yeah- let's all keep our reality heads screwed on tight here.
Carbon fibre itself is more than 60 YEARS (!) old now from lab research - and it's still very niche, very expensive product.
I expect same crawling progress on solid states.
p.s. despite all this being 'novel' approach - wasn't Tesla saying this exactly in its battery day - i.e. it will plan in future to make the batteries become the priciple structural member of the car.
p.p.s the stiffness of a material is not necessarily related to the stuctural strength at all (or toughness) - its quite easy to find a more bendable alumnium alloy that is stronger than a much stiffer steel. So if you can greater flexibility / bending you might accept a lower Youngs modulus (elastic stiffness) for a greater strength.
Carbon fibre is a good example here - it has massive stiffness to weight ratio compared to steel - but its strength and toughness and durability can be problematic (unless you understand specific context its working in ) - but its mostly held back because as well as being just dificult to manufacture to high quality and consistently on large scale, its also difficult to fabricate, design with it and joint to other materials.
As an engineer/designer we occassionally get pushed towards pondering carbon fibre within design because of it headline superior properties - but then because of all other drawbacks you inevitably wish you hadn't bothered.
Like I said - don't hold your breath
much ado about nothing. With a 24 Wh/kg of energy density is not going anywhere. Besides the battery in the floor of the vehicle is the best positioning for driving dynamics and crash safety as well. In addition, this solution would make body repair even more expensive that it already is. And a model X, or even e-tron, already shows that the weight penalty is not really an issue, also compared to traditional vehicles.
The real breakthrough rests on a realistically achievable two-fold increase in energy density (500 Wh/kg) of batteries, all the rest is just noise
Hi Nikky, Like you said, it's not something we'll be seing in the next year(s) or so. But still everybody got realy exited when solid state batteries were the new thing; and they still have to come to the carmarket. But still if even tis won't get in to cars (for what ever reason), it still is a great breakthrue. Every new way of storing energie gives to new ideas for another way. And who knows wat the new way for energie storage will be in lets say 20 years. If you look back 20 or 25 years Lihium was just coming around the corner. Every step is a step closer to a better world, and a step further in the evelution of not only the bateries, but also us, as humans.
hanks for digging all this info up, and greetings from Belgium.
Very interesting technology, but..... For this scheme to be a energy/weight win, the battery has to double as structure, and that means the material has to be distributed to where the vehicle actually needs structure, which is all over the place from front to back, top to bottom. At the same time, it still needs to implement a several-hundred volt, 100s-of-amps capability. And that means if there's a collision with a vehicle that conducts electricity (ie: body made of metal), there's going to be some pretty exciting sparks!
For drones, electric air taxis, and and future Formula racecars, this is great. For consumer automobiles, this is a HORRIBLE idea, because they crash large and small, and have to be repaired. You can't fix a dented battery!
Sure a quite interesting Technology and worth further Research, but one of the Keq Questions got unasked: How easy to work with is this as Structural Material?
Not much point in it if you can only ever get flat sheets out of it and cannt attach it to other Structural Components (eg by Riveting or Screwing, or by Glueing if its "Layer Adhesion" can take this)
Might be a bit early to ask though, but the Research Team should have this point on their Radar too.
Energy density is too low, it would have to be applied to larger objects.. Maybe a roof of a house or walls with PV to recharge, or maybe a bigger boat with a PV cover roof. Not so much for space since satellites are shrinking, so the in development SpaceX starship can do 100+ tonnes to low earth orbit and the limiting factor would be size of the payload. Also imagine the cost of getting into a fender bender and your bumper is part of a structural battery, because currently there just made made out of plastic and cost thousands of dollars to replace.
I think it will hit a wall when it comes to operating temperatures. It's no good for vehicles as an outer skin material as temperatures fluctuate from winters of -25 °c to summers of direct sunlight possibly +200°c on city streets. Electrons have a habit of slowing down when cold and speeding up when hot.
Meh... using batteries to build a car (or any other vehicle) means its far more likely that when (not if) a battery goes bad, the entire car (or substantial portions of it) will have to be replaced. This is an extremely expensive, and terribly wasteful idea... not to mention, anti-consumer and anti-environmental. No, having batteries be a modular component aside from the structural components of the vehicle allow for re-use of the vehicle structure with replacement batteries.
Look at this another way, if integration were a good idea, the various non-structural components of a car would have already been integrated... but vehicles undergo wear and tear, and parts must be maintenanced and replaced at differing intervals, hence the importance of modularity. Seeking a way to lighten batteries is laudable... but this is exchanging one problem for another.
If they can develop it into an applied coating, it may be commercially viable, but if it is used for frames or body panels, repairs will be prohibitive. If we didn't have psychologists marketing vehicles to go far longer ranges than most people need, smaller battery packs would work fine and smaller battery packs would be very viable for quick change at stops on longer range drives for day trips or vacations. Right now marketing is driving the industry down the wrong paths.
Until now all batteries age fairly quickly. What happens if Massless batteries, structural batteries grow old?! Nobody can afford to by a new vehicle every 3 or 4 years. I would like an answer to that question.
Nikki , nice piece of Tech. It’s simple to bring a great tech idea to market. Cash in your Dotcom like Elon and you will have a reasonable chance of success. You also might have some to throw at a pet project like Rocket Science ....
A New Revolution....
If we by that we mean a product that's comparably terrible as either a battery or a structural support; and if they are made integral to the frame of a vehicle, the vehicle would be incredibly expensive and one time use. I'm thinking not.
What about the possibilities to recycle? Today it is possible to extract car batteries after about 10 years and use them for power packs for about 10-20 years more. What do you do if the battery is inside the shell of the car? Put car shells in the backyard as power pack? And after? How do you recycle?
Even on this channel you forget to talk about those things.
Also, about the weight. It all depends on power to weight ratio. If you need to put alot of more weight of the battery into the shell of the car the center of gravity point could be worse than a fossil car.
Well the first gen battery is not useful in almost any aplication. It would be better to go regular carbon fiber and standard battery. It just doesnt have the structural strenght to compensate for the added weight of using it as a load bearing element. The second gen they mention thou is quite promising. Stiffer than aluminium and a more decent energy density. I can see how it would replace lots of elements on an airplane or drone as far as cars as long as its not dirt cheap we wont see it much.
Well enunciated! As an aside, imagine the day when all cars, trucks, and busses are electric. Now think of all the gas stations we currently have in a big city, and how many tankers of gasoline arrive daily to fill their tanks with gas. How much electricity does it take to replace all that gasoline? I might suggest, far more than the capacity of the current electrical grid. Furthermore, in order for electric cars to be really practical, they all need fast charging. We are talking here about charging at a rate of hundreds of amperes an hour, and 240 volt chargers. How much thick copper cable do you suppose it takes to make all those fast charging posts? I would suggest again, we will need more copper than we have.
If this is developed to the point where it has 10% of the energy density of Tesla's battery, then to replace Tesla's battery pack you'll have something that weighs 10x Tesla's current battery. That doesn't seem like it would be helpful or do anything for electric planes.
Aerospace uses, yep can definitely see that. Mass produced road vehicles, doubtful, probably hard to manufacture without scrapping large parts of structure if the embedded battery isn't working right as it moves down the line, End-Of-Life recycling could be a bugger as you'd have comingled active battery constituents and passive structure and if you get into a fender bender repair costs for these active structural components might not be economic and insurance companies might total these kinds of vehicles in even minor collisions.
I hope Tesla, for one, will adopt this battery-as-structure idea for its new big rig 's trailer. Why use a frame if you can utilize the battery pack as the load-carrying component instead? Hello, Elon?
Why focusing on its modulus? I wonder if making use of this carbon fibre's tensile strength makes much more sense. You could easily replace the conventional carbon fibre wrap that hydrogen tanks are made of and voila, there is your buffer battery.
To me, wrapping this is a much more reasonal approach than trying to form cracy complicated shapes, needed for structural cells of vehicles with all their cut outs and crash structures .
The Tesla wouldn't need 1000hp to accelerate 0-60 in under 2 sec if it only weighed 2000 lbs instead of 5000 lbs. But I hear about breakthrough batteries lasting 28000 yrs and everything else but see the same ole same ole in my new phones.
They really need to replace carbon fibre though. It cannot (viably) recycled at all.
And the drawback is that the battery is not replacable when it's structural.
As soon as your battery is broken, your vehicle (or plane) is junk.
replied to someone below, but thought this should be said by its self....
Tesla should have kept the "battery swap", just to allow a replacement battery. Now they are going with the iphone, that if the battery goes bad, just throw the whole car away. I was thinking that this was some misdirection from tesla to lead other down a bad path, but elon continually says that its his goal to share everything....I'm really disappointed...
Batteries have to be compressed to work. Tesla has previously had a double structure (one to hold the cells and the cell can to compress the cell). Other batteries using flat cells have a combined structure to compress the cell AND contain them. So really, Tesla are catching up with what flat cells can already do.... This new development is damn cool and a step on from both previous designs!
Did we suddenly forget how much carbon fiber and fiberglass costs? Fiberglass is just an extra material that is not normally used in batteries (extra expense that is eliminated with other methods). This is about as useful as Samsung's solid-state battery. 😒
24 wh/kg is less than 1/10th of the density of current batteries. If a car is more than 10% batteries by mass currently, then with this tech it's literally impossible to get the same performance. it does not take a genius to think this through. What's worse is that if your benchmark is the Leaf, then we already know this is not an adequate spec. this does not even take into account the fact that you need HV batteries to run a car, and if your entire structure is battery then any minor collision now turns your entire chassis lethal to the touch. maybe learn some high-school level physics before hyping up tech that is unworkable?
This structural battery tech is, quote "24wh per kilogram?" 4:10 , Am I missing something here? That is closer to the energy of one single 21700 cell.
Those structural batteries could work, but in a "bust mode", so they won't work for long durations as required. But, that is exactly the same way as how people are riding the rollercoasters, just for the fun of that!
Never going to work in cars due to risk of physical damage. Never going to work on commercial aircraft because regardless of strength the energy density isn't close to being sufficient. If the component is structural then either a) every cell works after manufacture and for the life of the vehicle; or b) there is cell redundancy with bypass of damaged cells so they do not compromise the overall performance of the battery. I do not want to recycle my car because I have a fender bender. I am sure this technology will find applications but I don't see it as a battery panacea.
BMW could revive the i3 with its composite body now as a structural battery... They already build the body itself, now they change the material and attach the multiple + and - sides for the battery 🔋
How is the battery replaced if it is the structure? Also sounds like recycling would be next to impossible. Anything using a battery is disposal? Here I thought we were trying to cut back on disposables. Not sure I see a practical application.
Don't forget the space race was funded by the American government. We can only get to these new solutions by massive government investment, not necessarily through investments in space travel, but through similar investment programs from governments, like the Swedish government.