chalmers university

The size and especially the weight of batteries is a critical factor for most things that use them. Battery weight is a key limitation for computers and cell phones. It is even more of a limitation for electric cars, ships, or planes.

If the battery of a device or vehicle can also function as a load-bearing structure, its weight and energy consumption can be dramatically reduced. This concept of a structural battery is sometimes called massless energy storage. It has the potential to halve the weight of a laptop computer, make cell phones as thin as a credit card, and increase the range of an electric car by as much as 70%.

Researchers at Chalmers University in Sweden have been working on structural battery technology for many years. Their first published results in 2018 showed how stiff, strong carbon fibers could be used for chemical storage of electrical energy.

Since then, they have been creating batteries with increasing energy density. Their latest versions still have only a quarter of the capacity of today’s lithium-ion batteries. But if batteries can be part of the structure of a vehicle, for example, and can be made of lightweight materials like carbon fiber, then the overall weight of the vehicle can be greatly reduced and not nearly as much energy will be needed to power it.

The goal of the Chalmers research is to achieve battery performance that makes it possible to commercialize the technology. There is a lot of engineering work to be done before these structural batteries can go from laboratory proofs of concept to real world use. But the potential is quite promising.

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World’s strongest battery paves way for light, energy-efficient vehicles

Photo, posted August 8, 2024, courtesy of NOI Techpark via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

The transition away from fossil fuels is driving a rapidly increasing need for batteries. Both electric vehicles and energy storage for the electric grid are enormous consumers of batteries. At present, lithium-ion batteries are almost universally used for these purposes. They have been getting better all the time and cheaper all the time and are likely to be the answer for the foreseeable future. But they are not perfect.

Lithium is only found in a relatively small number of places and mining and extracting it is fairly expensive and environmentally unfriendly. Lithium-ion batteries also frequently contain cobalt, which has its own set of problems. There are also safety issues related to the flammability of lithium-ion batteries.

As a result, there continue to be numerous efforts to identify and develop alternative battery technologies. One of these is sodium-ion batteries, which are similar in many ways to lithium-ion batteries but in which sodium replaces lithium as the cathode material.

Sodium is extremely common – it’s found in ordinary salt – and sodium-ion batteries have a high energy density and are easy to produce. They should have a long lifetime and have a more benign environmental impact than lithium-ion. Many companies and researchers are working on sodium-ion batteries and are making good progress.

A study by Chalmers University in Sweden looked at the potential for sodium-ion batteries and found that the batteries are particularly promising for use in energy storage even in their current state of development and could eventually be used in cars. Whether sodium-ion batteries can be good enough and cheap enough quickly enough to give lithium-ion a run for its money remains to be seen.

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Resource-efficient and climate-friendly with sodium-ion batteries

Photo, posted March 12, 2013, courtesy of Chris Hunkeler via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A structural battery

The size and especially the weight of batteries is a critical factor for most things that use them. Battery weight is a key limitation for computers and cell phones. It is even more of a limitation for electric cars, ships, or planes.

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Sodium-ion batteries

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