Cheapest, lighter and intense: Trifecta determines the perfect battery. No one has drawn an ideal cell yet, but one surreptitious emerging company believes it has found a new material that solves at least two of these challenges.
Dakus Energy It has been working quietly over the past two years, which improves the boat known as TAQ, which promises to be cheaper and lighter than the competing battery materials.
“We haven’t seen a scale in which TAQ is twice as compared to job occupants,” Harish Panda, co -founder and CEO of Daqus, told Techcrunch. The company was removed from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where research was funded in the materials partly through a Partnership with Lamborghini.
There are a few warnings, which are provided by Panda Marine: The company still determines the production of Taq, and it has just started working on the type of cells that can fall into EV. Plus, many Promising battery materials They died on the road to marketing.
But the upper trend is strong enough that a DAX comes out of the ghost with a seed tour of $ 6 million, led by Morningside, with the participation of individual investors whose name has not been revealed.
Daqus replaces the cathode in the Li -Eun battery. In a typical cell, the cathode consists of manghan-cobalt (NMC) or iron phosphate (known as LFP). NMC cells are more expensive, but they provide more energy density and longer in electric cars. LFP cells are cheaper but heavier.
American and European auto manufacturers preferred their EVS, but they started switching to LFP to reduce costs. The problem is that the vast majority of LFP materials are made in China, which makes it abnormal for EVS of manufacture that you want to qualify for tax credits.
Daqus, bis-tetraaminobenzoinone or TAQ is not made for a short period, is not made using expensive critical metals such as nickel or cobalt. Instead, it is made entirely of the widely available carbon vehicles.
For the first step in the manufacturing process, the molecules that the company already use to make dyes and fertilizers are used. “It is very cheap,” Panda said, noting that the company buys small batches at a price of $ 1 per kilogram. “So you can just imagine what this means when buying a ton of it.”
Moreover, the process used to synthesize the TAQ Cathode uses a largely lower energy. Panda said that making things does not require heating to only 120 ° C, between 700 to 800 ° C less than LFP or NMC.
on ManufacturingTAQ can be deposited using the existing equipment. But there is another opportunity to reduce costs: current anode manufacturing equipment can work with Taq. This would allow battery makers to use water as a solvent instead of NMP, a toxic solvent that needs to be captured and recycled.
In all, the characteristics of Taq Panda have left the material that materials can undermine the cheapest Li -Ion batteries on the market. “If someone says that LFP batteries are $ 50 per kilowatt hour, we will definitely be cheaper,” Panda said. “Exactly what needs to be discovered.”
Daqus produces metal cells in its laboratory space in Massachusetts, and her internal tests showed that TAQ is solid. The TAQ -based batteries can be charged and drained 2000 times and maintain at least 80 % of their original energy, and are stable at high temperatures. These small batteries also receive average, when it is extracted to EVS, which would enable fast charging for six minutes.
If there is a warning, the TAQ cathodes operate more than NMC, although they are competitive with LFP. However, it indicates that since the material is lighter, EVS can be designed around it lighter and you will need fewer batteries in general. This can be given EVS, supported by TAQ enough to compete with NMC while it is cheaper and lighter.
Sports cars may realize the benefits sooner. The weight was one of the largest electrical penalties: it is extremely easy to make a fast lightning EV in a straight line, but it makes one that deals well with the race track? This is proven that this is more difficult. A lightweight and fast -charging battery package can take a long way to make electric sports cars feel distinctive.
“Many car companies in the world are trying to make electric cars,” Panda said. “What is the difference between Rolls -Royce against Tesla? Certainly you have better seats, but in terms of the essence of the car, it was the engine. Now, it seems to be the battery.”
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