An eco-friendly, high-performance organic battery is being developed by scientists at UNSW Sydney.
A team of scientists at UNSW Chemistry have successfully developed an organic material that is able to store protons - and they have used it to create a rechargeable proton battery in the lab.
By leveraging hydrogen ions - protons - instead of traditional lithium, these batteries hold promise for addressing some of the critical challenges in modern energy storage, including resource scarcity, environmental impact, safety and cost.
The latest findings, recently published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, highlight the battery's ability to store energy quickly, last longer, and perform well under sub-zero conditions.
The material - tetraamino-benzoquinone (TABQ) - developed by PhD candidate Sicheng Wu and Professor Chuan Zhao, in collaboration with UNSW Engineering and ANSTO, has been shown to support rapid proton movement using hydrogen-bond networks.
"We have developed a novel, high-capacity small-molecule material for proton storage," says Prof. Zhao. "Using this material, we successfully built an all-organic proton battery that is effective at both room temperature and sub-zero freezing temperatures."
