Posted on 01/18/2006 10:12:27 AM PST by Ben Mugged
Firefly Energy has received a U.S. patent for a new lead acid battery technology that it believes has the potential to revolutionize the existing $16 billion worldwide lead acid battery market as well as serve applications like hybrid electric vehicles which historically aren't suitable for lead acid batteries.
~snip~ The invention is a battery comprised of an electrical current collector constructed of carbon or lightweight graphite foam. This foam exhibits a sizeable increase in surface area for chemical reactions to take place and eliminates the need for heavy lead plates found in traditional batteries. The graphite material resists corrosion and sulfation build-up, thus contributing to longer battery life and is lighter in weight than today's lead acid batteries.
~snip~ Performance improvements in lead acid batteries are realized through better utilization of surface area, he adds. The overwhelming restriction to lead acid battery efficiency to this point has been the lack of interface area between the active chemistry and the electrodes. Today, the chemistry is capable of delivering approximately 170 Watt Hours per Kilogram (Whr/kg), yet lead acid batteries only average around 30 Whr/kg. Up to now, achieving a higher surface area within a given lead-acid battery box required the addition of more and thinner lead electrodes. However, lead electrodes corrode, so increasing surface area by putting thinner lead electrodes in the battery increases corrosion and decreases battery life.
"By removing the corrosive heavy lead grids and replacing them with a graphite foam, Kurt Kelley's invention has helped unleash the innate power of lead acid chemistry," adds Williams. "It introduces a material that doesn't corrode and enables the weights and sizes of lead acid batteries to be reduced significantly."
(Excerpt) Read more at home.businesswire.com ...
Hmm, graphite foam, looks an awful lot like an ultracapacitor.
Won't change the fraudulent EPA MPG estimates.
You mean the "Flux Capacitor"?.........
Ok. Maybe I'm a dope, but they are still lead-acid batteries, yes? if so, where do they achieve this weight reduction?
Battery capacity and weight is the next needed breakthrough. It changes everything...
One of those "of course it's obvious in retrospect" inventions. Nice.
Sounds more like an accurate description of my wife's cooking.
The article says 2/3 less lead in this technology versus existing lead-acid technology.
The primary factor in energy storage for lead-acid batteries is the surface area of the lead that's exposed to acid. A solid plate of lead has a much lower area/volume ration than does a sphere. You need less lead to get the same net surface area, if you can use a bunch of small spheres. Less lead = lower weight.
The problem is how to access each sphere; and they seem to have handled that with this invention.
Self-ping for later!
It must be that they are replacing the metalic lead plates and the lead sponge supported by the plates, with a lighter material.
If so, they must be coating the material with lead in order to have the chemical reaction. The "plates" would also have to be coated with lead in order to carry the current to the terminals.
"Battery capacity and weight is the next needed breakthrough. It changes everything..."
Yep, now instead of fighting the liberals about drilling for oil we'll be fighting them about getting back to building Nuke plants to charge up all these cars ...
Is pure graphite a conductor of electricity....I forget.
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Firefly Chief Scientist Kurtis C. Kelley developed the technology while serving as senior research scientist in the advanced materials division of Caterpillar's R&D center.
Kelley was assigned the problem of pursuing increased performance for lead-acid batteries used by Caterpillar's product groups. The challenges that Kelley faced were manifold. First among them were how to address the main performance challenges of a lead acid battery:
-- Short life caused by corrosion (of the battery's positive plate) and sulfation (of the battery's negative plate).
-- Removing the bottlenecks to realizing the theoretical power and capacity of the lead acid chemistry itself.
"Since Kurt, an accomplished material scientist, had never designed a battery before, his problem-solving approach was unconstrained by the conventional battery wisdom held by lead acid battery technologists," says Edward F. Williams, CEO and a co-founder of Firefly Energy.
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Mil Ovan, senior vice president and Firefly Energy's other co-founder, believes the invention also addresses important environmental problems. "One of the reasons 'Firefly' was picked as the name of our company was because it's a green technology, since our battery's design drives one-half to two-thirds of the lead out of the battery through use of the graphite foam composite material. The graphite form is also easily recyclable through the existing infrastructure of lead acid battery recycling."
"Is pure graphite a conductor of electricity....I forget."
Yes, one never wants to be fly fishing or spin casting with an 8 to 14' graphite rod during an electrical storm.
Looks to me like they coat the plates so they still react with the acid but don't corrode then replace other portions i.e. terminals and such with this other foam junk. (junk is tech talk)
Dig those crazy foreheads.
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