To Get More Electric Mileage, Scientists Want to Turn a Car’s Frame Into a Battery

Range is the great limiting factor on today’s electric cars, as most can drive only 200 to 300 miles before needing to hit the charger again. But what if the car itself were made of battery? New researcher has found that carbon fibre , increasingly used as a weight-saving structural material, can also be used as battery components . Specifically, carbon fibres can be used as electrodes, the materials in batteries that collect and store the battery’s charge. (Batteries are made of two electrodes along with an electrolyte between them to control when the battery’s charge is released.) The scientists started by examining the microscopic structure of different types of carbon fibres. They found that large carbon fibres all oriented in the same direction are the strongest, but poor when it comes to holding an electric charge. Small and poorly oriented carbon fibres are the opposite: they’re weak, but can hold substantial amounts of electricity. The researchers say they found a way to make the carbon fibres slightly smaller and tweak their orientation to dramatically increase their electrical properties without weakening the fibres’ strength too much. This means the fibres can still be used in the body of a […]

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