07-20-2006, 01:30 PM
... having a lighter battery would mean a lot.
anyone heard of this? Firefly Energy is a company spunoff by Caterpillar when they decided they needed better batteries and no one else seemed like they were going to make one. My environmentally friendly coworker was just telling me about them. Here's all I can find on it though:
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."
anyone heard of this? Firefly Energy is a company spunoff by Caterpillar when they decided they needed better batteries and no one else seemed like they were going to make one. My environmentally friendly coworker was just telling me about them. Here's all I can find on it though:
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."