- Engineers have developed an EV battery housing built from wood to improve sustainability.
- The steel-wood hybrid is greener than traditional aluminum structures and even stronger.
- Cork is used for fire protection and helped the pack outperform a stock Tesla’s in lab tests.
Electric vehicles have made impressive strides in recent years, but several key design challenges remain. One of the most pressing is how to improve battery packs in a way that enhances both safety and long-term sustainability.
var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};
adpushup.que.push(function() {
if (adpushup.config.platform !== “DESKTOP”){
adpushup.triggerAd(“0f7e3106-c4d6-4db4-8135-c508879a76f8”);
} else {
adpushup.triggerAd(“82503191-e1d1-435a-874f-9c78a2a54a2f”);
}
});
Also: Washington Fire Crews Use Special Blankets To Extinguish EV Fires
We’ve all seen images and videos of EVs being incinerated when their battery packs have caught fire. So if someone tried to tell you that they’d come up with a revolutionary new battery housing that’s made out of wood, well, you’d naturally think they’d inhaled too many combusting lithium cell vapors. But boffins are adamant that, when it comes to EV battery cases, wood is good both for the planet and for safety.
A study carried out at the Technical University of Graz in Austria compared the performance of a conventional underfloor battery housing built with aluminium beams with three different wood-steel hybrid versions. The team wanted to see if it could build a housing that was more environmentally friendly, but required no strength compromises.
Lighter Footprint, Solid Performance
The hybrid beams use sustainable birch, poplar or paulownia cores covered in thin, lightweight steel, giving them a much smaller environmental footprint than those made from aluminium, which is incredibly energy intensive to produce. That much they knew before they’d got to the lab. But it’s the other results that provided the real surprises.
In a critical pile crash test where a vehicle or component is driven into a round steel obstacle at high speed the hybrid Bio!Lib battery housings returned almost exactly the same intrusion values as the aluminum housing of a Tesla Model S. The reason is the wood’s porous cell structure helps it absorb great amounts of energy.
The poplar and birch steel hybrids delivered up to 98 percent more energy absorption than ductile aluminum and 76 percent more than high-strength aluminium under large deformations. All three wood-based versions also showed strong resistance to bending.
Organic fire-resistant material
var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};
adpushup.que.push(function() {
if (adpushup.config.platform !== “DESKTOP”){
adpushup.triggerAd(“bb7964e9-07de-4b06-a83e-ead35079d53c”);
} else {
adpushup.triggerAd(“9b1169d9-7a89-4971-a77f-1397f7588751”);
}
});
And with the addition of cork – another renewable material – the study group led by TU Graz’s Florian Feist, was also able to make the housing usefully fire-resistant, returning temperatures on the off-fire side of the unit 100 degrees C (212 F) lower than on a Tesla housing.
“When cork is exposed to very high temperatures, it charses,” explains Florian Feist, who led the study. “The carbonization leads to a sharp drop in the already relatively low thermal conductivity, which protects the structures behind it.”
As electric vehicles become more common, it’s becoming clearer that their environmental impact goes beyond the absence of tailpipe emissions. While a wood-based battery case might seem unlikely, research like this highlights how smarter material choices could help EVs better deliver on their clean energy potential.
var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};
adpushup.que.push(function() {
if (adpushup.config.platform !== “DESKTOP”){
adpushup.triggerAd(“bb7964e9-07de-4b06-a83e-ead35079d53c”);
} else {
adpushup.triggerAd(“9b1169d9-7a89-4971-a77f-1397f7588751”);
}
});
#Putting #Flammable #Batteries #Wooden #Box #Sounds #Crazy #Science #Proves #Works
