Climate impact and energy use of structural battery composites in electrical vehicles—a comparative prospective life cycle assessment

Journal article, 2023

Purpose: Structural battery composites (SBCs) are multifunctional carbon fibre composites that can be used as structural elements in battery electric vehicles to store energy. By decreasing the weight of the vehicle, energy consumption in the use phase can be reduced, something that could be counteracted by the energy-intensive carbon fibre production. The purpose of this study is to shed light on such life-cycle considerations.

Method: Prospective life cycle assessment is used to compare the future cradle-to-grave climate impact and energy use of SBCs in battery electric vehicles to conventional metals and lithium-ion batteries. Additionally, the influences from differ- ent technology development routes, primarily related to the carbon fibre production, are assessed. The functional unit is the roof, hood, and doors of a battery electric vehicle with maintained flexural stiffness used for 200,000 km. To capture the multifunctionality of the material, the lithium-ion battery is also included in the functional unit.

Results and discussion: Results show that SBCs have a large potential to decrease the life cycle climate impact and energy use of battery electric vehicles, especially following routes focusing on decreasing the use of fossil resources, both for raw materials and as energy sources. The comparative assessment of multifunctional or recycled materials to conventional mate- rials introduces several methodological challenges, such as defining the functional unit and choice of allocation approach for distributing burdens and benefits between life cycles in recycling. This study illustrates the importance of using both the cut-off and end-of-life recycling allocation approaches to capture extremes and to not provide biased results. This study also highlights the importance of considering the ease of repairability in comparative studies, as damages to car parts made from SBCs are likely more difficult to repair than those made from conventional materials.

Conclusions: SBCs have the potential to reduce the life cycle climate impact and energy use for most scenarios compared to conventional materials. Three main methodological challenges were found: the comparison to a material with a well- established recycling system throughout its life cycle, the need for expanding the system boundaries to include the lithium-ion battery, and the difference in repairability of SBCs compared to the conventional material.