Researchers have been scrambling to find alternative materials for lithium-ion batteries, from manganese to sodium. Now they might have another: TAQ.
Lamborghini licenses MIT’s new high-capacity, fast-charging organic battery tech | TechCrunch::Researchers have been scrambling to find alternative materials for lithium-ion batteries, from manganese to sodium. Now they might have another: TAQ.
Unlike nearly every other lithium-ion battery chemistry, TAQ is an organic compound — not the free-range hippie type, but the kind made primarily of carbon.
Researchers have been investigating organic materials as cathodes, the negatively charged part of the cell, because they could store more energy at lower cost.
But so far, candidate materials haven’t been very durable because they tend to dissolve in the liquid electrolytes commonly used in the industry today.
The new material doesn’t dissolve in two widely used electrolytes, and it sports an energy density that’s 50% better than one of the most common lithium-ion battery chemistries in use today, nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC).
TAQ, short for bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone, is composed of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen arranged in a row of three neighboring hexagons.
The material was discovered by Tianyang Chen and Harish Banda while they were working in the lab of Mircea Dincă, a professor at MIT who has a partnership with Lamborghini to help the hypercar manufacturer electrify its lineup.
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