White Science: New Kind of Battery Concept: The Battery That Will Finally Unlock Massless Energy Storage
[As always, our people think up all kinds of amazing things. There is no limit to our creativity. This type of battery is almost like an elastic band. It is the tension inside it that generates power. It's an amazing concept. This concept is huge. This concept GENERATES ENERGY actually. You don't charge it. Its potential is quite insane actually. You won't need fuel, or if you do, it will be very little. Jan]
Scientists have made a massless structural battery 10 times better than before.
The battery cell performs well in structural and energy tests, with planned further improvements.
Structural batteries reduce weight and could revolutionize electric cars and planes.
In groundbreaking new research, scientists have made a structural battery 10 times better than in any previous experiment.
What’s a structural battery, and why is it such a big deal? The term refers to an energy storage device that can also bear weight as part of a structure—like if the studs in your home were all batteries, or if an electric fence also held up a wall.
In the new paper, researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden reveal how their “massless” structural battery works.
The main use case is for electric cars, where a literally massive amount of batteries take up a ton of room and don’t contribute to the actual structure of the car. In fact, these cars must be specially designed to carry the mass of the batteries. But what if the frame of the car could hold energy? “Due to their multifunctionality, structural battery composites are often referred to as ‘massless energy storage’ and have the potential to revolutionize the future design of electric vehicles and devices,” the researchers explain.
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To make the new structural battery, the scientists layered a buffer glass “fabric” between a positive and negative electrode, then packed it with a space-age polymer electrolyte and cured it in the oven. What results is a tough, flat battery cell that conducts well and holds up to tensile tests in all directions.