Daquus Energy has a plan to make EV sports cars quickly, light and cheap
Cheaper, lighter and denser: the trifecta defines an ideal battery. No one has yet designed a perfect cell, but a stealth startup thinks that he has found a new material that resolves at least two of these challenges.
Daqus Energy Opened quietly for a few years, refining a compound known as TAQ which promises to be cheaper and lighter than competing battery materials.
“We have not seen a metric that Taq hurts compared to the holders,” Techcrunch Harish Banda, co-founder and CEO of Daqus told Techcrunch. The company was retained from the MIT, where the research on the equipment was funded in part through a Partnership with Lamborghini.
There are some warnings, which Banda offers freely: the company is always on the scale of the production of TAQ, and it is only just starting to work on the type of cells that could fall into an EV. In addition, a lot Promising battery materials died on the marketing path.
But the increase is strong enough for Daqus to come out of stealth with a seed lap of $ 6 million led by Morningside with the participation of nameless individual investors.
The Daqus material replaces the cathode in a lithium-ion battery. In a typical cell, the cathode is in nickel-manmangese-co-bobalt (NMC) or iron phosphate (better known as LFP). NMC cells are more expensive, but offer greater energy density and a longer beach in electric vehicles. LFP cells are cheaper but heavier.
American and European car manufacturers have favored the NMC for their electric vehicles, but they started going to the LFP to reduce costs. The problem is that the vast majority of the materials of the LFP cathode are made in China, making it a non-start for American electric manufacturing vehicles who wish to qualify for tax credits.
The Daqus material has discovered, bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone or Taq for short, is not made using expensive critical minerals like nickel or cobalt. Instead, it is entirely made up of widely available carbon compounds.
For the first step in the manufacturing process, the two molecules used by the company are already used to make colors and fertilizers. “They are absolutely low cheap,” said Banda, noting that the company buys small prizes at $ 1 per kilogram. “So you cannot imagine what it means that when you buy a ton.”
In addition, the process used to synthesize a TAQ cathode uses much less energy. Doing things only require heating to 120 degrees C, some 700 to 800 degrees C lower than LFP or NMC cathods, said Banda.
On manufacturing lineTAQ can be deposited using existing equipment. But there is another opportunity to reduce costs: the existing anode manufacturing equipment can also operate with TAQ. This would allow battery manufacturers to use water as a solvent instead of the NMP, a toxic solvent which must be captured and recycled.
In total, TAQ’s qualities have left Banda to the confidence that the equipment can undermine the cheapest lithium-ion batteries on the market. “If someone says LFP batteries are $ 50 per kilowatt hour, we would be cheaper than that,” said Banda. “How much must be understood.”
Daqus produced money cells in its laboratory space in Massachusetts, and its internal tests have shown that the TAQ was durable. TAQ -based batteries can be loaded and unloaded 2,000 times and maintain at least 80% of its original capacity, and they are stable at high temperatures. These small batteries are also responsible at a pace which, when extrapolated in electric vehicles, would allow a quick load of six minutes.
If there is a warning, it is that the TAQ cathods take up more space than NMC, although they are competitive with LFP. However, he points out that because the material is lighter, electric vehicles designed around this could also be lighter and need fewer batteries overall. This could give a range sufficiently fueled by TAQ to compete with NMC while being cheaper and lighter.
Sports cars could make the advantages earlier. The weight was one of the largest electrification penalties: it is incredibly easy to make an EV which is fast in a straight line, but making one that manages well on a race track? It turned out to be more difficult. A light and fast -charge battery could greatly contribute to ensuring that electric sports cars feel special.
“Many car manufacturers worldwide are trying to make electric cars,” said Banda. “What is the difference between a Rolls Royce against a Tesla?” Of course, you have better seats, but in terms of the car nucleus, it was the engine. Now it seems that it is the battery. »»
