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April 2, 2021 03:30 am

Swedish Carbon-Fiber Battery Could Revolutionize Car Design

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tesla is known to be working on designing new battery modules that also work as structural elements, but the California automaker is fashioning those structural modules out of traditional cylindrical cells. There's a more elegant approach to the idea, though, and a group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden led by professor Leif Asp has just made a bit of a breakthrough in that regard, making each component of the battery out of materials that work structurally as well as electrically. The structural battery combines a carbon-fiber anode and a lithium-iron phosphate-coated aluminum foil cathode, which are separated by a glass fiber separator in a structural battery electrolyte matrix material. The anode does triple duty, hosting the lithium ions, conducting electrons, and reinforcing everything at the same time. The electrolyte and cathode similarly support structural loads and do their jobs in moving ions. The researchers tested a couple different types of glass fiber -- both resulting in cells with a nominal voltage of 2.8 V -- and achieved better results in terms of battery performance with thinner, plain weave. The cells using this construction had a specific capacity of 8.55 Ah/kg, an energy density of 23.6 Wh/kg (at 0.05 C), a specific power of 9.56 W/kg (at 3 C), and a thickness of 0.27 mm. To put at least one of those numbers in context, the 4680 cells that Tesla is moving to have an energy density of 380 Wh/kg. However, that energy density figure for the cylindrical cells does not include the mass of the structural matrix that surrounds them (when used as structural panels). Speaking of structural loads, the greatest stiffness was also achieved with plain glass fiber weave, at 25.5 GPa. Again, to put that number into context, it's roughly similar to glass fiber-reinforced plastic, whereas carbon fiber-reinforced plastic will be around 10 times greater, depending on whether it's resin transfer molding or woven sheets pre-impregnated with resin (known as pre-preg). Professor Asp's group is now working to see if swapping the cathode's aluminum foil for carbon fiber will increase both stiffness (which it should) and electrical performance. The group is also testing even thinner separators. He hopes to reach 75 Wh/kg and 75 GPa, which would result in a cell that is slightly stiffer than aluminum (GPa: 68) but obviously much lighter.

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