Lithium ion batteries have They have come a long way, but in many ways they have not gone far enough.
They load faster than ever, but there is still room for improvement. The materials they are made of, particularly cobalt and nickel, are expensive and problematic. Researchers have been scrambling to find alternative materials, from manganese to sodium. Now they could have another one: TAQ.
Unlike almost every other lithium-ion battery chemistry, TAQ is an organic compound, not the free-range hippie kind, 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 a lower cost. But so far, candidate materials have not been very durable because they tend to dissolve in the liquid electrolytes commonly used in today's industry.
The new material does not dissolve in two widely used electrolytes and has an energy density that is 50% better than one of the most common lithium-ion battery chemistries used 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 structure is similar to that of graphite, which today is almost universally used as an anode material (the positive terminal). Each TAQ molecule is attracted to up to six others through hydrogen bonds, which are not as strong as other bonds but are enough to create a nearly flat sheet of the material that can be superimposed on top of each other with holes storing lithium ions. .
The material was discovered by Tianyang Chen and Harish Banda while working in the laboratory of Mircea Dincă, an MIT professor who has a partnership with Lamborghini to help the hypercar maker electrify its range. Lamborghini, which previously used a supercapacitor developed in Dincă's laboratory in its Sian model, licensed the material's patent.
