Building better battery boxes

After a crash, battery boxes in electrical vehicles may get damaged which can lead to thermal run-away of the batteries – a process resulting in fire. Preventing this from happening is a critical design consideration for vehicle safety.

To ensure both safety and efficiency in vehicle design, the choice of the material of which battery boxes are made requires a careful trade-off between the shock-absorbing capabilities and the lightness of that material.

Metamaterials – lab-made materials with very specifically tuned properties – may be the ideal materials to strike this balance. Coulais’ research team has previously developed a new class of mechanical metamaterials that are lightweight but very good at absorbing the energy of a shock, and that outperform traditional protections for battery boxes by orders of magnitude.

The goal of the Proof of Concept project is to establish such metamaterials as a commercially viable solution for a new generation of battery boxes. These metamaterials will not only increase the safety of electric vehicles, but can also reduce their CO₂ footprint by making the battery boxes lighter. Moreover, the new generation of metamaterials could potentially be used in aerospace and seismic protection applications. Thus, the grant will pave the way for a broad use of mechanical metamaterials in industrial high-tech applications.

Proof of Concept

To be eligible for the Proof of Concept grant scheme, researchers must have previously received an ERC frontier research grant. The Proof of Concept funding is then used to develop findings they have made during former or current research projects. The main goal is to explore the commercial and social innovation potential of the research. With the grant, Coulais will hire a postdoctoral researcher who will co-lead the project, and cover material costs to create the battery box prototypes.