This model car's
carbon fibre roof and battery electrodes are made with wood
(February 9, 2016) Remember
wood paneled station wagons? Well, wood is back, but this time it's not for
aesthetics — it's for reducing vehicle weight with renewable materials. Swedish
researchers have just produced the world's first model car with a roof and
battery made from wood-based carbon fibre.
Although it's built on the scale of a toy, the prototype
vehicle represents a giant step towards realizing a vision of new lightweight
materials from the forest, one of the benefits of a so-called bioeconomy.
The demo is a joint project of KTH Royal Institute of
Technology, the Swedish researcher institute Innventia and Swerea, a research
group for industrial renewal and sustainable development.
The key ingredient in the carbon fibre composite is lignin,
a constituent of the cell walls of nearly all plants that grow on dry land.
Lignin is the second most abundant natural polymer in the world, surpassed only
by cellulose.
Göran Lindbergh, Professor of Chemical Engineering at KTH,
says that the use of wood lignin as an electrode material came from previous
research he did with Innventia. Lignin batteries can be produced from renewable
raw materials, in this case the byproduct from paper pulp production.
"The lightness of the material is especially important
for electric cars because then batteries last longer," Lindbergh says.
"Lignin-based carbon fiber is cheaper than ordinary carbon fibre.
Otherwise batteries made with lignin are indistinguishable from ordinary
batteries."