It's called bis-imino-acenaphthenequinone-paraphenylene (BP) copolymer.
One of the major limiting factors of rechargeable batteries today is how quickly their capacity can degrade. After just a year of regularly recharging a lithium-ion battery, it can't get close to its full capacity anymore. However, a new material holds the promise of changing the situation and allowing full capacity charges for five or more years.
As
EurekaAlert reports, a team of scientists working at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) has been looking specifically at the negative terminals inside lithium-ion batteries. They use graphite anodes, but also require a binder material; otherwise the graphite would simply fall apart inside the battery.
Today, poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) is used as the binder material, but its performance isn't great. After just 500 charge-discharge cycles, typically only 65% capacity can be achieved in a battery using PVDF. We've all experienced this when our smartphone battery no longer lasts a full day like it did when the phone was new, but such experiences could soon be a thing of the past.
