By Battery Power Staff
October 24, 2018 | After looking at the microstructure of commercially available carbon fibers which make up the shell of modern cars, researchers at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden believe the bodies of electric cars can be utilized to operate as electrodes in a lithium-ion battery, becoming part of the battery itself.
Leif Asp, a professor of material and computational mechanics at Chalmers, said in an interview with Quartz that the “structural batteries” could increase the distance an electric car can go on a single charge by providing up to a 50% weight reduction.
“A car body would then be not simply a load-bearing element, but also act as a battery,” Asp said. “It will also be possible to use the carbon fiber for other purposes such as harvesting kinetic energy, for sensors or for conductors of both energy and data.”
