Reimagining batteries as multifunctional materials

As the world shifts toward electric cars, renewable energy, and cleaner industry, batteries have become one of the defining technologies of our time. But today’s batteries still come with major drawbacks: they are heavy and bulky, especially in vehicles where every kilogram matters. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology say it may be time to rethink what a battery can be. In a new Comment published in Nature Reviews Materials, Richa Chaudhary, Leif Asp, and Varun Chaudhary argue that future batteries could do more than simply store energy. Instead, battery materials could also become part of a vehicle’s structure, helping support the car itself while powering it at the same time.

In electric vehicles (EVs), drones, satellites, marine vessels and robotics, batteries occupy a lot of space and contribute quite substantially to the total weight of the vehicle. For example, in EVs, the battery pack can account for 25–40% of total vehicle mass depending on the platform and chemistry. If batteries instead were designed from the beginning as a multifunctional system, for example, as structural load-bearers as well as energy storage devices, it would be a great step in efficiency.

New paradigna: structural batteries

Structural batteries take the idea of a battery one step further. Instead of being a separate, heavy component packed into a vehicle, the battery itself becomes part of the structure. In these materials, carbon fibers, already widely used in lightweight composites for cars and aircraft, can play two roles at once: they are part of the structure while also storing electrical energy.

—The vehicle industry today is extremely focused on optimization and lowering costs, and that can make it easy to overlook the enormous potential of structural batteries,” says Leif Asp, Professor at Chalmers University of Technology and WISE-affiliated researcher.

Structural battery composites are truly multifunctional materials. Not only can they store energy and carry mechanical load. They also work as sensors, energy harvesters, and actuators (shape-morphing). The idea to use the structural battery as a sensor first emerged unexpectedly. What researchers initially thought was simply a strange fluctuation in voltage measurements in the laboratory of colleagues of Prof. Asp at KTH Royal Institute of Technology eventually turned into an important research direction both at KTH and in Asp’s group.

— We want to influence the way electric vehicles are designed and built so multifuctional possibilities are integrated in the design from the beginning, continues Prof. Asp.

The full article “Redefining batteries as multifunctional materials” Nature Review Materials, 4 1132, (2026)

can be found at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41578-026-00920-8

To learn more about Prof. Leif Asp’s research in WISE:

Graphene-enhanced structural battery composites for future energy storage