Lithium-ion batteries have they have come a long way, but in many ways they have not gone far enough.
They charge faster than ever, but there’s still room for improvement. The materials they are made of, especially cobalt and nickel, are expensive and problematic. Researchers are trying to find alternative materials, from manganese to sodium. Now they may have another: TAQ.
Unlike almost every other lithium-ion battery chemistry, TAQ is an organic compound — not the free-range hippie kind, but the mostly carbon kind. Researchers have investigated organic materials as cathodes, the negatively charged part of the cell, because they could store more energy at a lower cost. But so far, the candidate materials have not been very durable because they tend to dissolve in the liquid electrolytes commonly used in industry today.
The new material does not dissolve in two commonly used electrolytes and has an energy density 50% better than one of the most common lithium-ion battery chemistries in use today, nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC).
TAQ, short for bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone, consists of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen arranged in an array of three adjacent hexagons. The structure is similar to that of graphite, which 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 sufficient to create a nearly flat sheet of material that can be stacked on top of each other with the holes storing lithium ions.
The material was discovered by Tianyang Chen and Harish Banda while working in the lab of Mircea Dincă, a professor at MIT who is working with Lamborghini to help the supercar maker electrify its lineup. Lamborghini, which previously used a supercapacitor developed in Dincă’s lab in Sian’s model, has licensed the patent for the material.
