32 September/October 2025 | E-Mobility Engineering New materials are fighting to reduce the weight of the battery enclosure in an EV, as Nick Flaherty explains Lightweighting the battery pack Around 80% of battery pack enclosures today are constructed from aluminium, with the rest built from steel. A new generation of materials is being explored for reduction of the weight of the pack, which can be considerable. A typical battery pack can weigh 500 kg, with 100 kg of that wrapped up in enclosure materials. At the same time, there are increasing requirements for fire protection and structural performance to be part of the vehicle and for protection to be offered against foreign objects. The pack material also increasingly has to be sustainable, reducing the overall carbon footprint of the vehicle, and it needs to be recycled in the end-oflife process of the vehicle to meet the latest European legislation. All of this must be achieved while meeting the crush and crash safety requirements to protect the battery and by hitting cost targets because car makers expect the battery pack to account for 30–50% of the vehicle cost. This is pitting the latest recycled aluminium materials against high silicon steel and a new generation of composite thermoplastic materials that can now be used to produce large components such as lids and bottom panels quickly and easily. Materials Aluminium enclosures are lightweight and corrosion-resistant and can be extruded into complex cooling channel designs with good thermal conductivity for passive/active cooling. Adding existing aluminium into virgin material significantly reduces the Large-scale thermoplastic manufacturing (Image courtesy of Kautex Textron)
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