Volvo Developing Nano-Battery Tech Built Into Car Body Panels

cartechboy writes "Electric vehicle batteries have three problems — they're big, heavy, and expensive. But what if you could shift EV batteries away from being big blocks under the car and engineer them into the car itself? Research groups at Imperial College London working with Volvo have spent three years developing a way to do exactly that. The researchers are storing energy in nano structure batteries woven into carbon fiber--which can then be formed into car body panels. These panel-style batteries charge and store energy faster than normal EV batteries, and they are also lighter and more eco-friendly. The research team has built a Volvo S80 prototype featuring the panels where the battery panel material has been used for the trunk lid. With the materials used on the doors, roof and hood, estimated range for a mid-size electric car is around 80 miles."

Comments

Hazard

[Hatta]

Great, so now it's not just one battery pack in the back that's a fire risk, the whole exterior of the car could spontaneously combust at any moment. Oh, and good bye independant body shops.

Re:Hazard

[alexander_686]

Well, let me ask you a slightly different question. How much more expensive would a trunk panel be if it were a battery?

Cars are moving towards carbon fiber and other exotic materials today because of the reduction in weight and thus improvement in MPG. So let’s assume your car already had a fiber carbon trunk which is going to be expensive to repair. If the marginal cost to add the battery function is low then you would still be better off.

Re:Hazard

[lgw]

Anything that stores energy, particularly electrical energy, is a fire risk, particularly when it involves sudden grievous damage to the structure containing that energy

That's just not true. There are many ways of storing power. Take hydrogen for example: you can store power by cracking water to get it, but how do you store it? If you store it in some compressed gas form, you're asking for trouble. If you store it in a big low-pressure balloon on top the bus (people actually do this), the practical risk is low, since with any rupture the hydrogen will move up quickly. But you can also store it as an metal hydride, which requires electrical power to release at any speed. Yes, it can catch fire, but it will just burn slowly for a long time, and can be extinguished normally.

Another example are the kinetic batteries occasionally used by satellites - storing power in a flywheel sounds dangerous, but not if you make the flywheel of soft plastic, so that it lacks the structural integrity to fly off the axel and will instead just shred itself if damaged. That was prototyped for electric car battery use, but the need to gimbal-mount the batteries was prohibitive.

Really, for electric car batteries the bar is pretty low - as safe as a tank of gasoline. For home solar to ever really take off it will be a greater safety concern, at least if you want to store enough power to run your house for a day (which seems like a minimum to not need grid power). I do wonder if the flywheel concept might not be worth a second look for the home - weight no longer an issue, and no need for gimbals.

Solution looking for a problem

[div_2n]

Having the batteries centralized like in the Tesla is a GOOD thing. They keep the center of gravity low on the car making it almost impossible to roll (seriously, the NHTSA had to specially design a scenario to get it to roll) and they make it possible to swap batteries for a quick charge which is going to be necessary unless the capacity of batteries can be increased by a factor of 10 with charge speeds doubled or tripled.

This is a step backwards in many ways not to mention the least of which is to necessarily increase the cost of mild accidents to replace the battery integrated pieces.