Lithium-ion batteries have We have come a long way, but in many ways we are still not far enough.
It charges faster than ever before, but there's still room for improvement. Those materials, particularly cobalt and nickel, are expensive and problematic. Researchers are racing to find alternative materials, from manganese to sodium. Now they may have another TAQ.
Unlike almost all other lithium-ion battery chemistries, TAQ is an organic compound, made primarily of carbon rather than some free-range hippie kind of thing. Researchers have been exploring organic materials as cathodes, the negatively charged part of batteries, because they can store more energy at a lower cost. But so far, candidate materials have not been very durable because they tend to dissolve in liquid electrolytes commonly used in industry today.
This new material is insoluble in two widely used electrolytes and is 50% less soluble than nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC), one of the most common lithium-ion battery chemistries in use today. Boasts excellent energy density.
TAQ stands for bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone, which consists of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen in a row of three adjacent hexagons. This structure is similar to that of graphite, which is now almost universally used as an anode material (positive terminal). Each TAQ molecule is attracted to up to six other molecules through hydrogen bonds. Hydrogen bonds are not as strong as other bonds, but they are enough to create a nearly flat sheet with holes that store lithium ions.
The material was discovered by Tianyang Chen and Harish Banda while working in the lab of Professor Mircea Dinka at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who partnered with Lamborghini to help the hypercar maker electrify its lineup. it was done. Lamborghini had previously used supercapacitors developed in Dinka's lab in its Syan models, and he granted a patent for the material.
