Fast Forward: Will Cars Always Need Batteries?

Sometimes the biggest innovations are made possible by the tiniest discoveries, like those of a micro—or even nano—scale.

Engineers love carbon fibres at this scale because they’re lightweight and super strong, but up until now, they’ve been incredibly expensive, accessible only to big-budget industries like aerospace, aviation, and professional athletics, where a $1,000 hockey stick or $5,000 bike is standard fare.

Dr. Yasmine Abdin, materials engineering assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, and her team have discovered a way to make carbon fibres out of a by-product of the oil and gas industry called asphaltenes AsphaltenesHigh-molecular-weight molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, often considered the heaviest and most polar components of crude oil. .

This has two distinct benefits: it finds a use for a by-product that can be toxic when it’s burned. And two, it makes carbon fibres far less expensive; cutting the cost almost in half.

“Now, not only aerospace can afford to use carbon fibres,” says Dr. Abdin, “But sectors like automotive can now afford them too and make vehicles lighter in the process.”

Cars today are made primarily of steel and aluminum, which is far heavier than its carbon counterpart. To put that in perspective, Dr. Abdin says, the density of steel is 7.8, whereas the density of carbon fibres is 1.8, yet strength-wise and stress-wise, they’re comparable.

“We want to use these carbon fibres in components that are subjected to load but need to be lightweight, like bikes, marine boats, sporting goods, even hockey sticks,” says Dr. Abdin.

There are potential uses in the world of wind energy too.

“Right now, part of the reason wind energy isn’t reliable is that it requires a lot of wind in order to actually get the blades moving,” says Dr. Abdin. “We need to be able to make bigger, lighter blades, but with the current fibreglass technology, it's not possible to increase the size of the blade.”

Carbon fibres made from asphaltenes could enable that.

There’s another fascinating element to carbon fibres; those at a nano scale have a high surface area and are very conductive, meaning they can absorb and store energy.

“There is a very cool invention called structural batteries, where, in a car, for example, the structure of the vehicle itself would carry both the load and the energy,” Dr. Abdin says. “You could get rid of the battery entirely.”

This isn’t in the immediate future, Dr. Abdin says, but cars with structural batteries could be on the road in the near future.

“Typically for a product like this to go to market, it might take 15 to 30 years,” Dr. Abdin says. “But this development has been very, very accelerated.”

So much so, Dr. Abdin says it’s conceivable that prototypes of vehicles with structural batteries could be in auto shows in three years, and maybe on the road in five to ten. Which means maybe, possibly, potentially, in a decade you might find yourself riding an electric bus powered by its own structure.

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