The Boulevard of Broken Battery dreams are littered with 20 years of "breakthrough batteries" that never left the lab. I'm not surprised. It's good to know about these batteries but we also need to keep it real.
But! Tesla himself, was a master of Try and Fail, then Fail Better! The naysayers really should go back and look at how many rockets crashed and burned extensively with the Mercury Astronauts watching! Persistence and Bravery won out as it will eventually do so again! Just cuz they haven’t been loud doesn’t mean they weren’t and are now, diligently using whatever resources are available to them! From the late 50’s and wild 60’s through now and into the future!
I was just going to write just that. Been following the "revolutionary" and "amazing discovery" "commercial available in 5 years" battery BS for a long time. Even the batteries that make it to the market like the salt water home battery that should be easier, better and cheaper turns out heavier, way bigger and more expensive that the Li-Ion counterpart ... with no long term tests or guarantee ...
You are very perceptive, and that is very true! First of all, it is truly a publicity stunt! Second, investors will not get their ROIs, so forget those cars!
@@gearhead_J I checked out the old Volvo video, and it appears as thought the strength of their battery material was largely achieved by sandwiching it between carbon fiber layers ...not exactly the same as I see here.
My fear with this “spread over” type of battery in a vehicle is with the ordinary little dents we have to get fixed. Bodywork is already expensive, imagine what a door filled with batteries would cost to replace!
I am an engineer living off grid and new techs are allways interesting! BUT what a pain to recycle this structural battery 'sandvich' after its life cycle! Hope they will present a solution to that as well.
I was thinking the exact thing. A benefit of the current design is that the batteries today can be removed for repair, refurbishment or recycling. I imagine there is a way to solve this, or rather for this to be viable it has to be solved, otherwise we will be adding to our mountains of waste.
I think the best solution would be to use frame style structure with modular, somewhat easily removed and replaced connectors. I think using it as a external body panel/structural member is just too much of a liability, in the practical sense. If used as an external weight bearer, suddenly anything but the very mildest of collisions becomes quite the electrical and chemical hazard. With my idea, I think the likely result would be that any vehicle with outdated or worn out batteries would be shipped or sold to a rebuilder, who simply removes the body panels and drivetrain, then inspects the reused components and installs the new frame/battery pieces from standard sized components they have in stock. The good/bad news is this favors the design of bulky, squarish, body-on-frame pick-ups and SUV's, the larger of which already have more or less standard frame dimensions in the US.
My thoughts also,. They should have kept the "battery swap", just to allow a replacement battery. Now they are going with the iphone, that if the battery goes bad, just throw the whole car away. I was thinking that this was some misdirection from tesla to lead other down a bad path, but elon continually says that its his goal to share everything....I'm really disappointed...
Same thinking here my fellow good engineers. A 2nd life for batteries are needed. Imagine a of pile of inefficient batteries being dumb to poorer countries... same issues with the plastic waste.. shipped to other nations.
As a career scientist, it was an outstanding video. You aptly cautioned about the chasm that may lie between proof of concept and the ability to manufacture affordable.
Okay wow, 1st off this is my 1st video with u guys and kudos, the presenter was knowledgeable, likable, and presented the info in which a non techy person could understand. Now to the video, hella cool way to make a battery. Wonder what an apple phone would look like. My wrist wouldn’t hurt from the weight lol
I imagine if they bolt the battery/frame/understructure to the rest of the car it won't be that complicated at all. I imagine if they weld it together that would be a problem.
I imagine it will be almost impossible to use. Never, ever does an innovation like this come without a significant advantage for the builder: usually making the consumer have to buy a new product more often.
Stiffness measurements made me giggle a little bit 😄 i didn't know it was a measurement before, And it was a very informative video that I learned quite a bit from. Thanks for the update 😀👍
The cell is the vehicle is an interesting take on an old slogan. I do worry about serviceability as mentioned elsewhere here, and I also worry about engineers (actually the bean counters that control them) deciding they understand all the loads better than they really do, with potentially catastrophic results.
One of the most fascinating developments I've learned of in a long time. Your caution, about how gradual may be the transition from lab to commercial product, is understandable, but I expect this technology to develop quickly: The appeal of load-bearing materials doubling as batteries is SO strong: big money is probably being spent, as I type this, on catching up on, improvising beyond, this technology. When that much goes into a project (as went recently into vaccine development), "miracles" (impressive achievements) can happen.
I wouldn´t expect mass use. As mentioned in the video, this is not a new idea and research into making for example a car chassis battery has been done before. The problem other then energy density will be price. EV makers are trying to make unified cells for their cars for a good reason. A battery that has to match structure of dozens of different products makes sense only in niche use where the cost is secondary and can never get close in price to cells made by billions. But hopefully it will be developed for drones/planes and other uses where every gram counts.
5:40, The higher the modulus; the less an object will deform within the elastic range. The likelihood the deformation is elastic is not affected by the value of the modulus. Sorry but the engineer and OCD in me just had to say something.
Transportation aside, the availability of the 2/4 wooden studs for home construction has greatly increased in price. So you say, how will we construct affordable homes? What if the walls and roofs of our home were also batteries?
@Bainsworth There is also talk of making bricks into batteries. USA housing construction technology is way behind in comparison to other developed countries. But as said, wood has become very expensive. I think the use of carbon fiber has potential and if that is the case then making it a battery is an option. It would be a real "Power Wall".
@@linmal2242 If I'm not mistaken, the question was: "What if the walls and roofs of our home were also batteries?" What have solar tiles to do with it? Some use every chance to publicly praise their lord, no matter the context...
@@nachtaktivster You have not priced the cost of wood lately. If we take the standard middle class suburban home as an example using traditional balloon-frame stud construction there is a lot of wood involved. Watch you will see the horror stories in a few months. Affordable housing is the flip side of BEV's. As I said housing construction in this country will have to adapt. My fancy is: highly insulated buildings, 3d printed masonry walls, carbon fiber roof frames with appropriate PV, recycled material internal walls. "Batteries not included!!!"
Solar only gives enough power per surface area to fly an ultralight aircraft with over-sized wings. If you slap solar cells on a 737, they need to be rugged enough to survive 200+km/h strikes from everything planes run into during a typical flight or they'll spend more time requiring maintenance than providing power. Covering the fuselage with solar cells is also problematic for maintenance since you'd have to strip cells to inspect it.
Cheers utubers have to stretch it clips to make more money hence the waffle, honestly could have covered this in four minutes flat. Too much waffle and I tend to switch off.
Chalmers Uni are amazing on both battery and solar tech. Also, you might want to check out Oxis Energy in Oxford who are focusing on aerospace and marine which are at 450w/kg for Li-S. Granted these might be more pricey geared for aircraft, but eventually it could make its way into automotive. And,, its neighbour, Oxford PV doing amazing work to commercialise perovskite PV which will reduce cost and can be embedded in composites. Happy days for Aptera, Lightyear, and Sono. The body as battery will be brilliant for marine sector with the hulls of boats.
A lot of others came to the same estimate I did, 120 miles(200 klm) range. But this brings up an opportunity, tunable range. The body can do short range. But batteries in for long trips or add to the amount of personal range anxiety. Charge the main battery at home while your driving. If the main battery fails take it to the shop and have "short" range. If the chassis as battery fails it can still function less efficiently on regular cells but extend the life of the vechicle.
Hi, dear Mrs.Gordon-Bloomfield , dear Transport Evolved Team! Your videos about battery chemistry are very interresting, I like to show these... We have just the problem to find a renewable chemistry for batteries of the future with low environnemental impacts and that we could recycling these with conventional methods.... In my opinion Manganese/Zink or a isotope (nucleoides) based chemistry are better than Solid State chemistry based on polymers and graphene... But it is the "output current" they will be deliver and the charging time (input current) for the most important things for quick charge technologies... In the other hand another technology will be the supercapacitor developped by Skeleton Technologies that will be a very suitable opportunity...
Wow you were doing so well until. 5:39 "The higher the measurement of stiffness the less likely something is to undergo elastic deformation" I think you intended to say plastic deformation, but more importantly, I don't think there is any correlation between young's modulus and the yield strength. In fact, steel always has the same young's modulus, but has a wide range yield strengths based on details of chemistry, heat treatment, and strain history.
Hi Nikky, Like you said, it's not something we'll be seing in the next year(s) or so. But still everybody got realy exited when solid state batteries were the new thing; and they still have to come to the carmarket. But still if even tis won't get in to cars (for what ever reason), it still is a great breakthrue. Every new way of storing energie gives to new ideas for another way. And who knows wat the new way for energie storage will be in lets say 20 years. If you look back 20 or 25 years Lihium was just coming around the corner. Every step is a step closer to a better world, and a step further in the evelution of not only the bateries, but also us, as humans. hanks for digging all this info up, and greetings from Belgium.
Hi Nikki, I do admire your channel & rely on you & a few others to keep me informed. I understand that being based in America you will be very heavy in Tesla content & a lot of your viewers will be happy with this. I did wonder why you mentioned Tesla twice before even starting to talk about the development from Sweden, I am not sure to keep talking about Tesla all the time is helpful to overall EV adoption.
She can’t win for losing. Tesla does have a world wide presence and is the clear leader in long range all battery electrics. She wasn’t patronizing tesla fans or promoting tesla in any way. She was simply showing where the current bar was set in terms of battery tech, range, energy density, etc. Then she contrasted that with the improvements this new technology could bring - - above and beyond the current leader.
1000kg of this material would give you a 24kwh battery. Essentially a first gen Leaf without a battery pack. Could be really amazing at even just a slightly higher energy density. I'd love to make some things with this.
No because a lot of this weight is not from the chassis. Things like seats, stearing wheel, air conditioner, electric cables, wheels & tires etc. can't be replaced by a "structural battery".
@@VolkerHett The structural battery will not be part of the crumble zones. It will be a part of the zones of your vehicle where everything should be as intact as possible to save your life in an accident, and it will part of what holds everything together every single day, hence "structural".
@@Arpedk Just my thinking. But that's far from the ton of metal in a car besides the drivetrain. And then we need it to be a lot stronger than it is now. And even stronger when we think about what might happen to physically damaged LiIon cells.
@@VolkerHett I think you are overthinking it. Lets say a normal car needs 400 kg of steel just for its structural properties. Then when you have a structural battery weighing in at 600 kg but it adds 300 kg of structural propertied. Then your total weight will become 600 kg (battery) + 100 kg (additional structural steel) = 700 kg. So your battery+structural ends up weighing 300 kg less than otherwise, and the battery only adds 300 kg of extra weight to the car. Everything else in the car will be not change as you have the same structural strength as before. You may also in the first end up with a battery that doesn't need any extra structural elements and thus a 600 kg battery may only end up with an additional weight of 200 kg (600 kg battery - 400 kg structural steel) as the extra steel in no longer needed. Compared to an ICE vehicles this may end of weighing less as the ICE vehicle still needs to add a gas tank, engine and transmission. At the end of this decade battery electric vehicles will have the same or less weight than an ICE vehicle.
Batteries have to be compressed to work. Tesla has previously had a double structure (one to hold the cells and the cell can to compress the cell). Other batteries using flat cells have a combined structure to compress the cell AND contain them. So really, Tesla are catching up with what flat cells can already do.... This new development is damn cool and a step on from both previous designs!
Interesting. So many things constantly being developed. Long way from being any sort of practical product but definitely worth following to see where it goes.
I expect to see sattelites and drones made with this material if it can be scaled up for mass manufacture, and later possibly in aircraft. Anything that can save weight in spacecraft will almost certainly be worth the cost, so I think this will be the earliest market for the material.
Sounds great superficially, but in reality this will be a nightmare in terms of long term serviceability unless revolutionary improvements to serviceability are made.
I agree. It’s usually the case in these “breakthroughs,” it works in the lab but they don’t think of the difficulties at each level such as mass manufacturing, repair, recycling, among other things.
I would assume most this would do is stuff like be used as load bearing central platform, with minimal protective cladding. Instead of current setup, where there is a heavy pack box around the battery cells to be load bearing. The battery box would still be load bearing and might not look outside that different, but crucially more of the weight of the pack box is the battery. Since the batteries are bearing the weight, instead of current setup of battery pack box protecting the cells from having to bear strains. There almost certainly would be outer skin of some material around just for sake of environmental and safety reasons. So battery box, that would be have to be handled delicately when empty or it would crumble. However full of battery cells..... Super stiff and works as the main load bearing chassis between front and back axles.
@@aritakalo8011 Unless the battery bolts directly into the frame, the battery box will still need to be strong enough to transfer loads from the frame it is bolted on to the cells, so the battery box will still have plenty of structural integrity on its own. Unless the whole thing is made into a solid epoxied block, the only way to make cells contribute to chassis integrity is by actually having the top and bottom covers operate as tension-compression planes and using the cells to keep them from buckling into each other, which can be done with conventional cells too.
Well a Cessna Skyhawk weighs 760kg empty of which 130kg is the engine. No idea what all the fittings would come to but let's guess a very conservative 80kg. That leaves a bare weight of 550kg. At 24 wh/kg that gives us 13.2 kw/h of energy. Woot.
Very interesting technology, but..... For this scheme to be a energy/weight win, the battery has to double as structure, and that means the material has to be distributed to where the vehicle actually needs structure, which is all over the place from front to back, top to bottom. At the same time, it still needs to implement a several-hundred volt, 100s-of-amps capability. And that means if there's a collision with a vehicle that conducts electricity (ie: body made of metal), there's going to be some pretty exciting sparks!
Volvo first showcased a similar battery in 2013. The re is a press release from Oct 17 2013 on that. It looks like they have very much advanced in the technology, but after 10 years (the Volvo development started 3.5 years earlier) they are still in the very early stages of development.
Minor whinge. The Elastic Modulus or stiffness is actually pretty consistent among steels, and indeed among most iron based alloys. The tensile yield strength can vary dramatically between different alloys and heat treats, but the elastic modulus typically only varies a few percent. Same thing with aluminum alloys, their stifness is always about 1/3 that of steel, but their tensile strength also varies considerably depending on alloy and heat treat.
How is the battery replaced if it is the structure? Also sounds like recycling would be next to impossible. Anything using a battery is disposal? Here I thought we were trying to cut back on disposables. Not sure I see a practical application.
Wow! What an excting new way to increase and excellerate the depreciation of an essential big ticket purchase item! Exchange it's most critically important consumable and therefore replacable component with a non replacable and structurally critical component. That way, when the component fails or is depleted, all you do is replace the whole high purchase item instead of the failed or depleted and recyclable component. Yeah. That's an exellent idea.
I think the biggest significance would be adding my vehicle to my home as a house battery. I’m not inclined to attach my 250 mile car to my home but a 1,000+ mile car can definitely work in a bidirectional way with my home or office.
Well enunciated! As an aside, imagine the day when all cars, trucks, and busses are electric. Now think of all the gas stations we currently have in a big city, and how many tankers of gasoline arrive daily to fill their tanks with gas. How much electricity does it take to replace all that gasoline? I might suggest, far more than the capacity of the current electrical grid. Furthermore, in order for electric cars to be really practical, they all need fast charging. We are talking here about charging at a rate of hundreds of amperes an hour, and 240 volt chargers. How much thick copper cable do you suppose it takes to make all those fast charging posts? I would suggest again, we will need more copper than we have.
I was thinking of such sort of batteries since I first heard about EVs. The next obvious step would be adding solar panel layer on top of these structural batteries, then the car will auto-charge itself when driven outside during the day and charging station could look like a light box over the night.
It’s a worry with more integrated batteries, it’ll reduce the serviceability and worse, the recyclability of the battery/product. We’ve already seen this with mobile phones that now get thrown away/replaced instead of fixed when the battery degrades. If these batteries are eventually used to form body parts of a car.. what happens if I gets a shunt from another car.. before you know it, it’ll be a financial write off for fairly a minor impact in a current ev. Not very environmentally friendly having to replace a car instead if just fixing it. Also, what about the projects that use battery second life.. or did/do those project only exist to help “recycle” current battery technology. Lots and lots of questions....
Funny how there are always "glass-half-empty people" who - in spite of almost always lacking any expertise in the area - have negative things to say about any new technology. Let's assume, until proven wrong, that the very smart people who came up with this invention (unlike you who, I'm guessing, have invented exactly zero new battery technologies) are also smart enough to figure out solutions to the imaginary problems that you "free internet thinkers" (read: uneducated amateurs) come up with in your lonely chambers.
You are right.. It is probably not for cars.. but there are lots of other use cases like planes as suggested, where it would be. Space satellites could be awesome too. laptops and phones of course.. it is a really nice tech.
I can see the possibility of using this tech in vtols, bikes and spacecraft in 20+ years. Looks like a nonstarter for cars where having a low center of gravity is a very good thing. Where other battery tech will be in 29 years is a pertinent question.
Very interesting. As you say where the automotive industry is concerned there is always manufacturing costs to be considered which I imagine could potentially sky rocket using this technology compared to more conventional materials. Then of course there is the repair costs and of course it could mean that vehicle life might be controlled by battery life. Having said that perhaps we might see a hybrid combination of body panels and smaller battery packs, who knows.
Sure a quite interesting Technology and worth further Research, but one of the Keq Questions got unasked: How easy to work with is this as Structural Material? Not much point in it if you can only ever get flat sheets out of it and cannt attach it to other Structural Components (eg by Riveting or Screwing, or by Glueing if its "Layer Adhesion" can take this) Might be a bit early to ask though, but the Research Team should have this point on their Radar too.
Modulus of elasticity the limit of elastic deformation occurs before plastic deformation begins elastic deformation begins immediately when any amount of forces applied
@@peterbrown6453Good point, but mixing functionalities may lead to extra costs when repairing. Anyway if the cost of the structural composite becomes very low this is not a problem. Then we have the recycling issue.
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It seems like a great idea, especially for static structures like siding on a house, but what would the impact be in a crash. The cost to replace a body panel or sub structure could make it cost prohibitive.
Don't forget that all large battery cars require cooling. Tesla's cars all have their batteries in a liquid that is pumped to a small radiator or heat pump where itt is cooled, then recirculated to cool the batteries. Cooling batteries that are part of numerous structural parts of a car will be a challenge.
My concern here is that the battery pack is the vehicle so what happens when the batteries no longer function as such. I guess one would design the structure to be modular and recyclable. Would also be interesting to know the energy cost for production of the battery based structures versus steel, aluminum or composites.
I could see this being used for replaceable panels on cars in addition to traditional battery packs, but not replacing them out right, without artificially limiting the life of the vehicle do to battery degradation. In a similar vein, I could see them being used for replaceable Wings on aircraft, but not replacing the entire fuselage without shortening the life of the aircraft itself unnecessarily.
It would have been grate if you would have put numbers on screen especially when there is something they can be compared to, especially stiffness and capacity per kg. The widespread and interest in this will be further fueled by more actors if less rare materials can be used to produce it, currently the supply chain is a big concern from both business reliability and labor rights perspectives.
🙏🙏👏👏👏❤️❤️ amazing ❤️ I love this battery if u put one over other In layers you can increase the battery capacity is not a bad idea today it can be done
Great recap summary. Definitely for other high-tech gadget and Aero Space. LoL Carbon fiber autobody battery pack panel... imagine the insurance premium $$$ from a minor fender bender costing a quarter of the car to fix.
Those structural batteries could work, but in a "bust mode", so they won't work for long durations as required. But, that is exactly the same way as how people are riding the rollercoasters, just for the fun of that!
So the idea is basically turning the body of a vehicle into a capacitor, I envision some safety concerns for that application. A charged body panel might remain extremely dangerous in the case of damage via crash or impact.
Hi. I would be interested to see medical prosthetics developers make use of this structural come battery for leg or hand prosthetics particularly for children where weight is a major constraint to acceptance for day long usage.
Nikki, where is the "380 Wh/kg" for 4680 cells coming from? I have not really seen anything that would hint that the new cells have a much higher energy density than the current 21700's.
well all power draw, and drive range will always be limited to the actual total weight of the product + actual loads/passenger/driver itself.. and not to forget if its on traversing incline..
This sounds awesome! I'm just concerned about parking my new battery pack structural panel outside and a hail storm hits and my car burns down due to the damage to the battery. Or a car accident or fender bender causing the battery to catch fire.
I love it, 1000 mile range. Now.. can we address the cost of charging that battery pack now? Power costs are rising each year with no end in sight, even though the electrons they are moving around aren't getting harder to move.
The Boulevard of Broken Battery dreams are littered with 20 years of "breakthrough batteries" that never left the lab. I'm not surprised. It's good to know about these batteries but we also need to keep it real.
Gotta keep the funding and government grants coming every year so it will never leave the lab
But! Tesla himself, was a master of Try and Fail, then Fail Better! The naysayers really should go back and look at how many rockets crashed and burned extensively with the Mercury Astronauts watching! Persistence and Bravery won out as it will eventually do so again! Just cuz they haven’t been loud doesn’t mean they weren’t and are now, diligently using whatever resources are available to them! From the late 50’s and wild 60’s through now and into the future!
You'd be surprised at the number of research results of such projects find their way to 'regular' batteries.
I was just going to write just that. Been following the "revolutionary" and "amazing discovery" "commercial available in 5 years" battery BS for a long time.
Even the batteries that make it to the market like the salt water home battery that should be easier, better and cheaper turns out heavier, way bigger and more expensive that the Li-Ion counterpart ... with no long term tests or guarantee ...
You are very perceptive, and that is very true!
First of all, it is truly a publicity stunt!
Second, investors will not get their ROIs, so forget those cars!
Nikki, you are fast. I’m Swedish and saw this on a Swedish tech-site only yesterday, and you have allready made a video about it!
@@cofal79 yeah I remember seeing this clip 5-6 years ago th-cam.com/video/svA2x-o9Myo/w-d-xo.html
@@gearhead_J I checked out the old Volvo video, and it appears as thought the strength of their battery material was largely achieved by sandwiching it between carbon fiber layers ...not exactly the same as I see here.
If I would have a dollar every time a "breakthrough" is in the making, I would be a billionaire by now!
Let's not exaggerate... You'd have a few thousand.
@@Thorocious Haha! Ok, fair enough!
There's actually a way of making a dollar everytime a new breakthrough is announced: it's called journalism.
@@sufurt782 haha
My fear with this “spread over” type of battery in a vehicle is with the ordinary little dents we have to get fixed. Bodywork is already expensive, imagine what a door filled with batteries would cost to replace!
Yeah, but then you can get a horse and buggy... no doors to ding there :-)
Exactly. At first look it seems awesome...but I don't know...this seems like something I would shy away from spending $25k or more on...
Although...flexible and self-healing batteries may become a thing. With nano-tech improving the way it is, this may become viable really soon.
As I understand it they envision it to be used more for other things than cars.
Exactly.
Awesome video as always. quick note 4860 cells (@1:35ish) --> 4680 cells. But we know what you meant!
Script bothers -Nikki.
@@transportevolved I was like...wait...what? But great video! Love this subject. My old materials smiled!
@@transportevolved Can you image this product on the Aptera?
I am an engineer living off grid and new techs are allways interesting! BUT what a pain to recycle this structural battery 'sandvich' after its life cycle! Hope they will present a solution to that as well.
I was thinking the exact thing. A benefit of the current design is that the batteries today can be removed for repair, refurbishment or recycling. I imagine there is a way to solve this, or rather for this to be viable it has to be solved, otherwise we will be adding to our mountains of waste.
I think the best solution would be to use frame style structure with modular, somewhat easily removed and replaced connectors. I think using it as a external body panel/structural member is just too much of a liability, in the practical sense.
If used as an external weight bearer, suddenly anything but the very mildest of collisions becomes quite the electrical and chemical hazard.
With my idea, I think the likely result would be that any vehicle with outdated or worn out batteries would be shipped or sold to a rebuilder, who simply removes the body panels and drivetrain, then inspects the reused components and installs the new frame/battery pieces from standard sized components they have in stock.
The good/bad news is this favors the design of bulky, squarish, body-on-frame pick-ups and SUV's, the larger of which already have more or less standard frame dimensions in the US.
My thoughts also,. They should have kept the "battery swap", just to allow a replacement battery. Now they are going with the iphone, that if the battery goes bad, just throw the whole car away. I was thinking that this was some misdirection from tesla to lead other down a bad path, but elon continually says that its his goal to share everything....I'm really disappointed...
Same thinking here my fellow good engineers. A 2nd life for batteries are needed. Imagine a of pile of inefficient batteries being dumb to poorer countries... same issues with the plastic waste.. shipped to other nations.
this
As a career scientist, it was an outstanding video. You aptly cautioned about the chasm that may lie between proof of concept and the ability to manufacture affordable.
Okay wow, 1st off this is my 1st video with u guys and kudos, the presenter was knowledgeable, likable, and presented the info in which a non techy person could understand. Now to the video, hella cool way to make a battery. Wonder what an apple phone would look like. My wrist wouldn’t hurt from the weight lol
I can't help but imagine how difficult and expensive it would be to repair an EV whose body structure is also it's battery!
I was thinking about that too but I have seen other solid-state batteries and they were cutting them in half and piercing them without any issues.
I imagine if they bolt the battery/frame/understructure to the rest of the car it won't be that complicated at all. I imagine if they weld it together that would be a problem.
I imagine it will be almost impossible to use. Never, ever does an innovation like this come without a significant advantage for the builder: usually making the consumer have to buy a new product more often.
@@TheAllMightyGodofCod I agree. But as soon as two builders do this, they will compete via lower cost...hopefully.
Great news. Advising the latest info regarding energy storage and usage is wonderful. This data is timely. Thank you.!
Stiffness measurements made me giggle a little bit 😄 i didn't know it was a measurement before, And it was a very informative video that I learned quite a bit from. Thanks for the update 😀👍
The cell is the vehicle is an interesting take on an old slogan. I do worry about serviceability as mentioned elsewhere here, and I also worry about engineers (actually the bean counters that control them) deciding they understand all the loads better than they really do, with potentially catastrophic results.
It's less than 3rd of aluminium, not sure how much use that is
One of the most fascinating developments I've learned of in a long time. Your caution, about how gradual may be the transition from lab to commercial product, is understandable, but I expect this technology to develop quickly: The appeal of load-bearing materials doubling as batteries is SO strong: big money is probably being spent, as I type this, on catching up on, improvising beyond, this technology. When that much goes into a project (as went recently into vaccine development), "miracles" (impressive achievements) can happen.
I wouldn´t expect mass use. As mentioned in the video, this is not a new idea and research into making for example a car chassis battery has been done before. The problem other then energy density will be price. EV makers are trying to make unified cells for their cars for a good reason. A battery that has to match structure of dozens of different products makes sense only in niche use where the cost is secondary and can never get close in price to cells made by billions. But hopefully it will be developed for drones/planes and other uses where every gram counts.
5:40, The higher the modulus; the less an object will deform within the elastic range. The likelihood the deformation is elastic is not affected by the value of the modulus. Sorry but the engineer and OCD in me just had to say something.
Transportation aside, the availability of the 2/4 wooden studs for home construction has greatly increased in price. So you say, how will we construct affordable homes? What if the walls and roofs of our home were also batteries?
@Bainsworth There is also talk of making bricks into batteries. USA housing construction technology is way behind in comparison to other developed countries. But as said, wood has become very expensive. I think the use of carbon fiber has potential and if that is the case then making it a battery is an option. It would be a real "Power Wall".
I doubt that those sort of walls will be cheaper than wooden ones anytime soon. How could one associate affordability in that context???
Musk has already addressed that question with his generating solar roof tile !
@@linmal2242 If I'm not mistaken, the question was: "What if the walls and roofs of our home were also batteries?"
What have solar tiles to do with it? Some use every chance to publicly praise their lord, no matter the context...
@@nachtaktivster
You have not priced the cost of wood lately. If we take the standard middle class suburban home as an example using traditional balloon-frame stud construction there is a lot of wood involved. Watch you will see the horror stories in a few months.
Affordable housing is the flip side of BEV's. As I said housing construction in this country will have to adapt. My fancy is: highly insulated buildings, 3d printed masonry walls, carbon fiber roof frames with appropriate PV, recycled material internal walls. "Batteries not included!!!"
The presenter is so well spoken.. great channel!
Imagine it they combined that battery with a top layer of thin film solar, then use that product to build aeroplane wings and fuselage.
Solar only gives enough power per surface area to fly an ultralight aircraft with over-sized wings. If you slap solar cells on a 737, they need to be rugged enough to survive 200+km/h strikes from everything planes run into during a typical flight or they'll spend more time requiring maintenance than providing power. Covering the fuselage with solar cells is also problematic for maintenance since you'd have to strip cells to inspect it.
Where do you work!? PROMOTION!
But what if they combined it like Sono on its Sion?
@@stuartlark6441 Sions don't fly.
They could then run the plan's AC with it. So what?
The "However ..." starts at 10:45. Recommend that viewers start there.
Cheers utubers have to stretch it clips to make more money hence the waffle, honestly could have covered this in four minutes flat. Too much waffle and I tend to switch off.
Chalmers Uni are amazing on both battery and solar tech. Also, you might want to check out Oxis Energy in Oxford who are focusing on aerospace and marine which are at 450w/kg for Li-S. Granted these might be more pricey geared for aircraft, but eventually it could make its way into automotive. And,, its neighbour, Oxford PV doing amazing work to commercialise perovskite PV which will reduce cost and can be embedded in composites. Happy days for Aptera, Lightyear, and Sono. The body as battery will be brilliant for marine sector with the hulls of boats.
A lot of others came to the same estimate I did, 120 miles(200 klm) range. But this brings up an opportunity, tunable range. The body can do short range. But batteries in for long trips or add to the amount of personal range anxiety. Charge the main battery at home while your driving. If the main battery fails take it to the shop and have "short" range. If the chassis as battery fails it can still function less efficiently on regular cells but extend the life of the vechicle.
Note: 4680, not 4860 cells. No big deal but a mis- speak. Excellent and exciting video.
Best EV channel on TH-cam, keep growing!
If they get warm when charged, cats can warm themselves on the bonnet again...
Thats how they get ran over. The strays still sleep under cars here to this day but most people are using good ol gasolina!
@@Sentient.A.I. I have a solution: get a dog instead
@@samautrey I have a dog. I am talking about strays man @R E L A X A N D R E A D •
🔥🐈🔥😸🔥🐈⬛🔥
Hi, dear Mrs.Gordon-Bloomfield , dear Transport Evolved Team! Your videos about battery chemistry are very interresting, I like to show these... We have just the problem to find a renewable chemistry for batteries of the future with low environnemental impacts and that we could recycling these with conventional methods.... In my opinion Manganese/Zink or a isotope (nucleoides) based chemistry are better than Solid State chemistry based on polymers and graphene... But it is the "output current" they will be deliver and the charging time (input current) for the most important things for quick charge technologies... In the other hand another technology will be the supercapacitor developped by Skeleton Technologies that will be a very suitable opportunity...
You should put the number in the screen, it would help the information assimilation
Very exciting! Commercial vehicles & aircraft are crying out for just such tech... fingers crossed it makes it:)
Wow you were doing so well until. 5:39
"The higher the measurement of stiffness the less likely something is to undergo elastic deformation" I think you intended to say plastic deformation, but more importantly, I don't think there is any correlation between young's modulus and the yield strength. In fact, steel always has the same young's modulus, but has a wide range yield strengths based on details of chemistry, heat treatment, and strain history.
Hi Nikky, Like you said, it's not something we'll be seing in the next year(s) or so. But still everybody got realy exited when solid state batteries were the new thing; and they still have to come to the carmarket. But still if even tis won't get in to cars (for what ever reason), it still is a great breakthrue. Every new way of storing energie gives to new ideas for another way. And who knows wat the new way for energie storage will be in lets say 20 years. If you look back 20 or 25 years Lihium was just coming around the corner. Every step is a step closer to a better world, and a step further in the evelution of not only the bateries, but also us, as humans.
hanks for digging all this info up, and greetings from Belgium.
Hi Nikki, I do admire your channel & rely on you & a few others to keep me informed. I understand that being based in America you will be very heavy in Tesla content & a lot of your viewers will be happy with this. I did wonder why you mentioned Tesla twice before even starting to talk about the development from Sweden, I am not sure to keep talking about Tesla all the time is helpful to overall EV adoption.
She can’t win for losing. Tesla does have a world wide presence and is the clear leader in long range all battery electrics. She wasn’t patronizing tesla fans or promoting tesla in any way. She was simply showing where the current bar was set in terms of battery tech, range, energy density, etc. Then she contrasted that with the improvements this new technology could bring - - above and beyond the current leader.
Quite an astounding breakthrough! Brilliant the structure is da battery.. given 10yr maybe commonly used, all good staying patient 🔋
1000kg of this material would give you a 24kwh battery. Essentially a first gen Leaf without a battery pack. Could be really amazing at even just a slightly higher energy density. I'd love to make some things with this.
No because a lot of this weight is not from the chassis. Things like seats, stearing wheel, air conditioner, electric cables, wheels & tires etc. can't be replaced by a "structural battery".
Then somebody rear ends your car, which would usually lead to some crumbles in the trunk and a broken light, wreaks your car.
@@VolkerHett The structural battery will not be part of the crumble zones. It will be a part of the zones of your vehicle where everything should be as intact as possible to save your life in an accident, and it will part of what holds everything together every single day, hence "structural".
@@Arpedk Just my thinking. But that's far from the ton of metal in a car besides the drivetrain. And then we need it to be a lot stronger than it is now. And even stronger when we think about what might happen to physically damaged LiIon cells.
@@VolkerHett I think you are overthinking it. Lets say a normal car needs 400 kg of steel just for its structural properties.
Then when you have a structural battery weighing in at 600 kg but it adds 300 kg of structural propertied. Then your total weight will become 600 kg (battery) + 100 kg (additional structural steel) = 700 kg. So your battery+structural ends up weighing 300 kg less than otherwise, and the battery only adds 300 kg of extra weight to the car.
Everything else in the car will be not change as you have the same structural strength as before.
You may also in the first end up with a battery that doesn't need any extra structural elements and thus a 600 kg battery may only end up with an additional weight of 200 kg (600 kg battery - 400 kg structural steel) as the extra steel in no longer needed. Compared to an ICE vehicles this may end of weighing less as the ICE vehicle still needs to add a gas tank, engine and transmission. At the end of this decade battery electric vehicles will have the same or less weight than an ICE vehicle.
Awesome stuff, I'll probably be dead before the decade comes to see such technologies at play, but what a time for my grandchildren.
Batteries have to be compressed to work. Tesla has previously had a double structure (one to hold the cells and the cell can to compress the cell). Other batteries using flat cells have a combined structure to compress the cell AND contain them. So really, Tesla are catching up with what flat cells can already do.... This new development is damn cool and a step on from both previous designs!
Interesting. So many things constantly being developed. Long way from being any sort of practical product but definitely worth following to see where it goes.
I expect to see sattelites and drones made with this material if it can be scaled up for mass manufacture, and later possibly in aircraft. Anything that can save weight in spacecraft will almost certainly be worth the cost, so I think this will be the earliest market for the material.
And how do you replace the batteries in a car when they are integrated into the frame/body of the vehicle. Batteries in packs can be swapped out.
Bingo. Just like tesla, buy a new one.
Sounds great superficially, but in reality this will be a nightmare in terms of long term serviceability unless revolutionary improvements to serviceability are made.
I agree. It’s usually the case in these “breakthroughs,” it works in the lab but they don’t think of the difficulties at each level such as mass manufacturing, repair, recycling, among other things.
Yeah autos become disposable when their batteries need service, don’t they?
A small parking accident might become a nightmare.
This might be useful in some hidden parts of a car, but I'd prefer it not being the body shell.
I would assume most this would do is stuff like be used as load bearing central platform, with minimal protective cladding. Instead of current setup, where there is a heavy pack box around the battery cells to be load bearing. The battery box would still be load bearing and might not look outside that different, but crucially more of the weight of the pack box is the battery. Since the batteries are bearing the weight, instead of current setup of battery pack box protecting the cells from having to bear strains. There almost certainly would be outer skin of some material around just for sake of environmental and safety reasons.
So battery box, that would be have to be handled delicately when empty or it would crumble. However full of battery cells..... Super stiff and works as the main load bearing chassis between front and back axles.
@@aritakalo8011 Unless the battery bolts directly into the frame, the battery box will still need to be strong enough to transfer loads from the frame it is bolted on to the cells, so the battery box will still have plenty of structural integrity on its own. Unless the whole thing is made into a solid epoxied block, the only way to make cells contribute to chassis integrity is by actually having the top and bottom covers operate as tension-compression planes and using the cells to keep them from buckling into each other, which can be done with conventional cells too.
Very clear and concise and in terms I think I understand. Thank you.
Excellent 👍
Building structure's as well when it becomes cheap enough. Then Power Wall will be literal 😁
Cheers
Research project and long term aside, this is still a very exciting piece of news.
More power to them, I say!
Thank you for an interesting and well presented run down. May I assume that the battery life also becomes the vehicle's life ?
throw away cars
Problem with load bearing is what happens after 8 to 10 years? How do you replace some of the battery's?
Good point.. a new modular design with redundancy built in could be an awesome side effect technology.
Need to get hold of one of these cells and test them out
The structure is the battery! WOW! Could be a real game changer for all E vehicles - 4 wheel, 2 wheel and aircraft.
Well a Cessna Skyhawk weighs 760kg empty of which 130kg is the engine. No idea what all the fittings would come to but let's guess a very conservative 80kg. That leaves a bare weight of 550kg. At 24 wh/kg that gives us 13.2 kw/h of energy. Woot.
and then lightning ...
Very interesting technology, but..... For this scheme to be a energy/weight win, the battery has to double as structure, and that means the material has to be distributed to where the vehicle actually needs structure, which is all over the place from front to back, top to bottom. At the same time, it still needs to implement a several-hundred volt, 100s-of-amps capability. And that means if there's a collision with a vehicle that conducts electricity (ie: body made of metal), there's going to be some pretty exciting sparks!
Volvo first showcased a similar battery in 2013. The re is a press release from Oct 17 2013 on that.
It looks like they have very much advanced in the technology, but after 10 years (the Volvo development started 3.5 years earlier) they are still in the very early stages of development.
Minor whinge. The Elastic Modulus or stiffness is actually pretty consistent among steels, and indeed among most iron based alloys. The tensile yield strength can vary dramatically between different alloys and heat treats, but the elastic modulus typically only varies a few percent. Same thing with aluminum alloys, their stifness is always about 1/3 that of steel, but their tensile strength also varies considerably depending on alloy and heat treat.
I love this EV news keeps us engaged in the amazing possibilities to come 👍
More like electric plains
How is the battery replaced if it is the structure? Also sounds like recycling would be next to impossible. Anything using a battery is disposal? Here I thought we were trying to cut back on disposables. Not sure I see a practical application.
Very cool tech! (heja Sverige 😊)
Wow! What an excting new way to increase and excellerate the depreciation of an essential big ticket purchase item! Exchange it's most critically important consumable and therefore replacable component with a non replacable and structurally critical component. That way, when the component fails or is depleted, all you do is replace the whole high purchase item instead of the failed or depleted and recyclable component. Yeah. That's an exellent idea.
Soo. This with an outer coating of solar panels. Perfect.
Yes please, Im a dreamer not an engineer, so its luckely not up to us to make it work 🤣
I think the biggest significance would be adding my vehicle to my home as a house battery. I’m not inclined to attach my 250 mile car to my home but a 1,000+ mile car can definitely work in a bidirectional way with my home or office.
Well enunciated! As an aside, imagine the day when all cars, trucks, and busses are electric. Now think of all the gas stations we currently have in a big city, and how many tankers of gasoline arrive daily to fill their tanks with gas. How much electricity does it take to replace all that gasoline? I might suggest, far more than the capacity of the current electrical grid. Furthermore, in order for electric cars to be really practical, they all need fast charging. We are talking here about charging at a rate of hundreds of amperes an hour, and 240 volt chargers. How much thick copper cable do you suppose it takes to make all those fast charging posts? I would suggest again, we will need more copper than we have.
Thank you very much. Well done !
I was thinking of such sort of batteries since I first heard about EVs. The next obvious step would be adding solar panel layer on top of these structural batteries, then the car will auto-charge itself when driven outside during the day and charging station could look like a light box over the night.
Great, clear concise content as alway. :)
It’s a worry with more integrated batteries, it’ll reduce the serviceability and worse, the recyclability of the battery/product. We’ve already seen this with mobile phones that now get thrown away/replaced instead of fixed when the battery degrades.
If these batteries are eventually used to form body parts of a car.. what happens if I gets a shunt from another car.. before you know it, it’ll be a financial write off for fairly a minor impact in a current ev. Not very environmentally friendly having to replace a car instead if just fixing it. Also, what about the projects that use battery second life.. or did/do those project only exist to help “recycle” current battery technology. Lots and lots of questions....
Funny how there are always "glass-half-empty people" who - in spite of almost always lacking any expertise in the area - have negative things to say about any new technology. Let's assume, until proven wrong, that the very smart people who came up with this invention (unlike you who, I'm guessing, have invented exactly zero new battery technologies) are also smart enough to figure out solutions to the imaginary problems that you "free internet thinkers" (read: uneducated amateurs) come up with in your lonely chambers.
Agree. Not to speak of short circuiting the whole thing at a minor impact and the whole hull goes up in flames. Carbon fibre burns well.
@@seybertooth9282 👍 iPhone are 100% recycled. Apple actually designed a robotic disassembly machine
You are right.. It is probably not for cars.. but there are lots of other use cases like planes as suggested, where it would be. Space satellites could be awesome too. laptops and phones of course.. it is a really nice tech.
@@Mr_Seppo Yes, just google "copper thieve electrocution"
Thanks a lot for this great overview!
I can see the possibility of using this tech in vtols, bikes and spacecraft in 20+ years. Looks like a nonstarter for cars where having a low center of gravity is a very good thing. Where other battery tech will be in 29 years is a pertinent question.
Very interesting. As you say where the automotive industry is concerned there is always manufacturing costs to be considered which I imagine could potentially sky rocket using this technology compared to more conventional materials. Then of course there is the repair costs and of course it could mean that vehicle life might be controlled by battery life. Having said that perhaps we might see a hybrid combination of body panels and smaller battery packs, who knows.
Some flex can be a good thing as long as you don't go past the yeald point in youngs modulus of elasticity. Very interesting.
in other words; it is fine as long as you do not break it ;-)
@@jyvben1520 dead right 👍
Don't want to snap. Carbide is stronger but cracks. Steel is not as strong, but will bend when pushed past it's limit.
Excellent video! Thank you.
Sure a quite interesting Technology and worth further Research, but one of the Keq Questions got unasked: How easy to work with is this as Structural Material?
Not much point in it if you can only ever get flat sheets out of it and cannt attach it to other Structural Components (eg by Riveting or Screwing, or by Glueing if its "Layer Adhesion" can take this)
Might be a bit early to ask though, but the Research Team should have this point on their Radar too.
Modulus of elasticity the limit of elastic deformation occurs before plastic deformation begins elastic deformation begins immediately when any amount of forces applied
So if the battery fails (which is the most probable) We will be force to change the structural part? ( chassis, roof , doors,...
Does not sound good
I agree that’s a problem, but current gen batteries last longer than the car so probably not a big problem.
@@peterbrown6453Good point, but mixing functionalities may lead to extra costs when repairing.
Anyway if the cost of the structural composite becomes very low this is not a problem.
Then we have the recycling issue.
Thank You' Awesome Information! First_ Electronics-Tools-Drones-E'Skate Board Decks- Bicycle and Electric On and Off Road Bi Wheel and ATV Frames- Water Craft- Then Small Flying Air Craft _ The Accident Prone Road Vehicles Will Wait to Get a Predictably, Insureably and Repairable Safe Design Right! Imo😶👍
Of course I’m subscribed to this great show . 🇬🇧
It seems like a great idea, especially for static structures like siding on a house, but what would the impact be in a crash. The cost to replace a body panel or sub structure could make it cost prohibitive.
I've also had this idea. Love it.
Always great articles!! Thank you a lot!
Excellent video and well explained!!!!
I’m really interested about battery’s because it will change everything!!
Awesome & promising tech! Kia Kaha Nikki from Aotearoa!🇳🇿
Energy per unit mass is Specific Energy; Energy Density is energy per unit of volume.
Don't forget that all large battery cars require cooling. Tesla's cars all have their batteries in a liquid that is pumped to a small radiator or heat pump where itt is cooled, then recirculated to cool the batteries. Cooling batteries that are part of numerous structural parts of a car will be a challenge.
If they can do it, it will be as exciting as solid state batteries.
My concern here is that the battery pack is the vehicle so what happens when the batteries no longer function as such. I guess one would design the structure to be modular and recyclable. Would also be interesting to know the energy cost for production of the battery based structures versus steel, aluminum or composites.
I could see this being used for replaceable panels on cars in addition to traditional battery packs, but not replacing them out right, without artificially limiting the life of the vehicle do to battery degradation. In a similar vein, I could see them being used for replaceable Wings on aircraft, but not replacing the entire fuselage without shortening the life of the aircraft itself unnecessarily.
Colin Chapman of Lotus would be proud of this idea.
It would have been grate if you would have put numbers on screen especially when there is something they can be compared to, especially stiffness and capacity per kg.
The widespread and interest in this will be further fueled by more actors if less rare materials can be used to produce it, currently the supply chain is a big concern from both business reliability and labor rights perspectives.
🙏🙏👏👏👏❤️❤️ amazing ❤️ I love this battery if u put one over other In layers you can increase the battery capacity is not a bad idea today it can be done
Great recap summary. Definitely for other high-tech gadget and Aero Space.
LoL Carbon fiber autobody battery pack panel... imagine the insurance premium $$$ from a minor fender bender costing a quarter of the car to fix.
Amazing video, thank you for the great content! :)
Those structural batteries could work, but in a "bust mode", so they won't work for long durations as required. But, that is exactly the same way as how people are riding the rollercoasters, just for the fun of that!
So the idea is basically turning the body of a vehicle into a capacitor, I envision some safety concerns for that application. A charged body panel might remain extremely dangerous in the case of damage via crash or impact.
Nice content. Well done for your channel.
Stiffness increases the amount of force required to approach the modulus of elasticity
Hi. I would be interested to see medical prosthetics developers make use of this structural come battery for leg or hand prosthetics particularly for children where weight is a major constraint to acceptance for day long usage.
Nikki, where is the "380 Wh/kg" for 4680 cells coming from? I have not really seen anything that would hint that the new cells have a much higher energy density than the current 21700's.
Correction " not as stiff as aluminum" cross out strong, strength was not mentioned.
well all power draw, and drive range will always be limited to the actual total weight of the product + actual loads/passenger/driver itself.. and not to forget if its on traversing incline..
Hi Nikki, Tesla's new cells are 4680, not 4860.
Is battery recycling possible on this battery? At battery end of life, the vehicle itself is gone also. No second use as well.
This sounds awesome! I'm just concerned about parking my new battery pack structural panel outside and a hail storm hits and my car burns down due to the damage to the battery. Or a car accident or fender bender causing the battery to catch fire.
I love it, 1000 mile range. Now.. can we address the cost of charging that battery pack now? Power costs are rising each year with no end in sight, even though the electrons they are moving around aren't getting harder to move.
They need to start working on combining this with the solar glass
"Elastic Defamation" -- Nikki's approach to criticizing bounders like Nikola and Lordstown!