Aviation and car companies are looking to move away from fossil fuels and create carbon-neutral versions of airplanes and vehicles. These will demand safe, energy-dense, lightweight technologies. That is where structural battery composite (SBC) technology comes in.
SBCs represent a monumental leap in materials science – melding the robust mechanical integrity of advanced composites with integrated rechargable energy storage. Instead of being encased in a separate housing SBCs become the housing – serving dual functions. This duality could radically alter the way airplanes, drones, flying cars, electric vehicles, robots and consumer electronics are built, powered and perform.
SBCs are one of the ten emerging technologies in 2025 named in a June World Economic Forum report in collaboration with scientific publisher Frontiers. The Innovator is publishing a series of independently reported in-depth articles on the 2025 emerging trends in its FutureScope section, under a collaboration agreement with Frontiers.
In the future, SBCs could enable all rigid vehicle body panels to similarly store energy. Airbus is already experimenting with SBCs for use in aircraft, notes the Forum report.
The impact of SBCs will be substantial. “Economically, they promise to cut manufacturing costs by reducing the amount of structural materials, which, in turn, can lower the overall weight of vehicles and aircraft; lighter-weight vehicles require less fuel to operate as well,” says the Forum report. “Environmentally, SBCs could lead to energy-efficient designs that reduce material requirements, and make reuse, repurposing and recycling faster and cheaper, if developed appropriately. Their use in industries including aviation and transport could contribute to more reliable and sustainable operations.”
While the potential is clear challenges must be overcome for the technology to be commercialized and scale-up.
“It sounds like a really good idea, but the practical implementation was always going to be tough,” Andrew Maynard, professor of Advanced Technology Transitions at Arizona State University and one of the contributors to the SBC section of the report, said in an interview with The Innovator. “On paper it is possible to produce these complex and sophisticated batteries, but the design cost, manufacturing and cost of adoption are very high.”
In addition to technical challenges such as achieving high energy storage density, long-term stability and safety there are sustainability and regulatory hurdles.
Carbon fiber, while five times stronger than steel, currently faces significant environmental constraints due to carbon-intensive production and recycling challenges. However, advances in AI-driven composite material design suggest the emergence of more scalable,bio-based alternatives.
And, as structural battery composite materials mature a new set of safety regulations and standards must be developed before wide-scale adoption is possible, says the Forum report.
Swedish Researchers’ Pivotal Role In Advancing SBCs
Research on structural batteries has been going on for many years at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, in some stages in collaboration with researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. When research leader Leif Asp, who is a professor at the Department of Industrial and Materials Science at Chalmers, and colleagues published their first results in 2018 on how stiff, strong carbon fiber could store electrical energy chemically, the advance attracted massive attention. The news that carbon fiber can function as electrodes in lithium-ion batteries was widely spread and the achievement was ranked as one of the year’s ten biggest breakthroughs by Physics World, the, membership magazine of the Institute of Physics, one of the largest physical societies in the world..
Since then, the Chalmers research group has further developed its concept to increase both stiffness and energy density. Another milestone was reached in 2021, when researchers from Chalmers, in collaboration with KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, presented a structural battery with properties that far exceeded anything yet seen, in terms of electrical energy storage, stiffness and strength. At that time the multi-functional performance was ten times higher than previous structural battery prototypes, around 30 Wh/kg.
The Chalmers researchers again made headlines in September 2024 when they presented a structural battery made of carbon fiber composite that is as stiff as aluminum and energy-dense enough to be used commercially which they said could halve the weight of a laptop, make the mobile phone as thin as a credit card or increase the driving range of an electric car by up to 70 percent on a single charge.
Today lithium-ion batteries are extensively employed for powering devices such as electric vehicles and electric aircraft but the energy density state-of-the-art of lithium-ion battery remains inadequate, limiting the range of electric transportation. This can be overcome by developing structural electrodes with high specific capacity, extending the voltage window, and integrating the multifunctional battery in structure, according to a 2024 research paper co-authored by Asp published in Advanced Materials. Along storing the electrochemical energy, the primary role of the multi-functional battery is to carry the applicable mechanical load and reduce the overall system weight, extending the driving range or the mileage. Structural batteries offer potential to achieve weight savings of up to 20% by just replacing the roof of an electric vehicle with a structural battery. This weight reduction allows for the installation of more batteries, thereby increasing the vehicle’s mileage.
How Close Is Commercialization?
From the start, the goal was to achieve a performance that makes it possible to commercialize the technology, Asp said in an interview with The Innovator. The Chalmers researchers were so confident in their success that they spun out a startup called Sinonus, which has since shuttered its doors.
Sinonus’ goal was to commercialize the carbon fiber composites that store electrical energy developed by Chalmers. “We hired an experienced business developer, and we believed we were ready to raise a lot of money,” says Asp. “This was a misjudgment. The investors did not see the clear benefit and the killer application did not appear. “
Asp is undeterred. While there is still a lot of engineering work to be done before the battery cells have taken the step from lab manufacturing on a small scale to being produced on a large scale, he says SBCs are close to a tipping point. Researchers at Chalmers have more than doubled the density of its material in the past year. Meanwhile, huge investments are being made in SBCs in China and in Singapore. In 2016 there were less than 100 scientific papers on SBCs, says Asp. Today there are more than 1000.
Asp says he believes one of the first applications will be drones. Drones using SBC wings or fuselages could double flight times, a big advantage for surveillance, delivery and mapping drones where payload and endurance count.
Aircraft and car manufacturers are likely to follow as are vertical takeoff and landing aircraft and individually owned flying cars, says Arizona State University’s Maynard.
Robotics is another sector that could benefit from SBCs. “Power is a major issue in humanoid robots,” says Maynard. “Batteries are heavy. If you can integrate them into the exoskeleton or individual parts, it would increase the energy density and help decrease the cost.”
Maynard and Asp believe high-end applications like use in aircraft and cars are five to ten years away. Asp believes SBC use in consumer electronic applications could be realized in the next few years.
More Than A Product Improvement
It would be a mistake to only think of SBCs in terms of product improvement. The convergence of materials science and energy technology through structural battery composites represents a critical inflection point for global industries, according to the Dubai Future Foundation, which contributed to the Forum’s report.
“Over the next decade, these innovative materials have the potential to fundamentally restructure how infrastructure, energy storage and product design are conceived across multiple sectors,” it says in its strategic outlook on SBCs.
Beyond supply chain impacts, the transformative potential is most evident in transport, says the Dubai Foundation. In the automotive sector, a 10% reduction in vehicle weight can improve fuel efficiency by 6%-8% and increase EV range by 70%. Aviation presents an equally compelling opportunity, with potential fuel efficiency improvements of 15% over a 1,500 km flight.
“These are not merely incremental improvements, but potential catalysts for systemic change in transport design and energy consumption,” says the Dubai Foundation.
So how could business leaders think about SBCs? The most forward-thinking organizations will view this technology as more than a product improvement,” says the Dubai Foundation. “It represents a fundamental redesign of how material functionality is conceived.
The report says those who proactively invest in understanding and developing these technologies will be positioned to:
- Redesign entire product categories
- Reduce energy consumption across industrial sectors
- Create more resilient and adaptive infrastructural systems
- Develop new economic models that challenge existing technological paradigms
“The next decade will offer significant advantages to organizations that look beyond incremental improvements and recognize SBCs as a transformative technological platform,” says the Dubai Foundation. “Success will depend on unprecedented collaboration across materials science, design, energy systems and regulatory frameworks.”
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