Cheaper, lighter and poet: the trifecta defines an ideal battery. Nobody has yet developed a perfect cell, but a secret startup believes that it has found a new material that solves at least two of these challenges.
Daqus energy has been tacitly in operation for four months and refines a connection that is known as TAQ that promises to be cheaper and easier to be than competing battery materials.
“We have not seen a metric in which TAQ makes bad compared to the official owners,” Harish Banda, co -founder and CEO of Daqus, told Techcrunch. The company was designed from the MIT, where research on the material was partially financed by A Partnership with Lamborghini.
There are some restrictions that Banda offers freely: The company still scales TAQ’s production and has just started to work on the type of cells that could fall into an EV. Also many promising battery materials died on the way to commercialization.
But the upward trend is strong enough that Daqus with a seed round of 6 million US dollars from Morningide with the participation of unnamed individual investors from Stealth can be seen.
Daqus’ material replaces the cathode in a lithium-ion battery. In a typical cell, the cathode consists of nickel-manganese cobalt (NMC) or iron phosphate (better known as LFP). NMC cells are more expensive, but offer a larger energy density and a larger range in electric vehicles. LFP cells are cheaper, but heavier.
US and European car manufacturers preferred NMC for their EVS, but they have started to switch to LFP to reduce the costs. The problem is that the vast majority of the LFP cathoden materials are produced in China, which makes them a non-autumn for EVS in the USA who want to qualify for tax credits.
Bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone works with the material Daqus or briefly with expensive critical minerals such as nickel or cobalt. Instead, it consists exclusively of widespread carbon base.
For the first step in the manufacturing process, the two molecules that the company uses are already used for the production of dye and fertilizers. “They are absolutely cheap,” said Banda and noticed that the company buys small batches for $ 1 per kilogram. “So you can only imagine what that means if you buy a lot of it.”
In addition, the process with which a TAQ cathode is synthesized uses far less energy. Creating the witness requires heating to 120 degrees C, about 700 to 800 degrees C lower than the LFP or NMC cathodes, said Banda.
On the Production lineTAQ can be stored with existing devices. However, there is another opportunity to reduce the costs: existing Anode production devices can also work with TAQ. This would enable battery manufacturers to use water as a solvent instead of NMP, a toxic solvent that must be recorded and recycled.
Overall, the qualities of TAQ have confident that the material can undercut the cheapest lithium-ion batteries on the market. “If someone says that the LFP batteries are 50 US dollars per kilowatt hour, we would definitely be cheaper,” said Banda. “Just how much has to be found.”
Daqus produces coin cells in its laboratory room in Massachusetts, and its internal tests have shown that Taq is durable. TAQ-based batteries can be charged and released 2,000 times and at least 80% of its original capacity maintained, and they are stable at high temperatures. These small batteries also charge at a speed, which, if they are extrapolated on EVS, enable six minutes of fast charging.
If there is a restriction, the TAQ cathodes take up more space than NMC, even though they are competitive with LFP. Nevertheless, he points out that because the material is lighter, EVS that are designed could also be made easier and need fewer batteries overall. This could give TAQ-driven EVS enough reach to compete with NMC and be cheaper and easier at the same time.
Sports cars could see the advantages earlier. The weight was one of the largest punishments of electrification: it is incredibly easy to create an EV that is quickly lightning in a straight line, but one that cuts off well on a race track? That is more difficult. A light, fast -charged battery could make a large contribution to making electrical sports cars particularly more efficient.
“Many automotive companies in the world try to produce electric cars,” said Banda. “What is the difference between a Rolls Royce and a Tesla? Of course they have better seats, but with regard to the core of the car it was the engine in the past. Now it seems to be the battery. “
