INTEGRATION OF NATURAL FIBER COMPOSITES INTO AUTOMOTIVE ELECTRIC VEHICLE BATTERY ENCLOSURES

Lightweight structural materials are essential for cutting the transport sector’s carbon footprint, yet today’s high-volume composites still rely heavily on energy-intensive glass or carbon fibres. To meet national decarbonisation targets, the industry needs alternatives with a much lower embodied energy that can be recovered or recycled at end-of-life. Bio-based fibres offer that promise, but their uptake has been slow because their performance-to-cost ratio lags behind conventional glass- and carbon-fibre laminates. This study closes that gap. Using production-scale liquid-composite-moulding, we fabricated flax-fibre/epoxy laminates that incorporate graphene-oxide interface tailoring, a biomimetic Helicoid lay-up and fiber hybrid architectures. We then assessed their low-velocity-impact resistance under OEM battery-tray test protocols and compared the results with those from the glass-fibre composite currently used in electric-vehicle under-body shields. The optimised bio-hybrid design replaced 43 % of the glass by mass while matching the incumbent laminate’s impact performance—a first for natural-fibre-reinforced polymers under full-scale, production-relevant conditions. These findings demonstrate a viable route to high-performance yet far more sustainable composites for future transportation applications.