From electric planes that can only fly for so long to electric cars that need to pull over for a recharge every few hundred miles, heavy, bulky batteries are a huge, limiting factor in how far these types of vehicles can travel. Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology have been exploring an interesting alternative to these conventional energy storage solutions and are claiming a big breakthrough, demonstrating a new type of "massless" battery that could work as a power source and structural component of a vehicle at the same time.

The research team at Chalmers University of Technology has spent years investigating the idea that batteries can double as structural components to save on weight in vehicle design. Carbon fiber is a key pillar of this research, owing to its excellent and well-known mechanical properties, along with its ability to act as an electrode material when engineered in the right way.

In 2018, the scientists published a study describing a form carbon fiber with just the right arrangement of crystals to offer both the required stiffness for vehicle construction and the necessary electrochemical performance for energy storage. As part of their efforts to translate this research to real-world applications, the researchers have now produced a carbon-fiber-based structural battery they say performs 10 times better than any previous version.