Advanced lead acid battery designs for hybrid electric vehicles

In this paper, the authors present a high power, lead acid battery design that has demonstrated long life. The design uses horizontal plates with multiple lug connectors to deliver high power for hybrid electric vehicle applications. The horizontal plate configuration helps improve life by allowing for better thermal management and mechanical compression. They use computer models that were previously developed to estimate the specific energy performance of this battery when different conductive and/or nonconductive additives are mixed into the active material. They investigate both spherical as well as different aspect ratio additives. They show how the use of small, conductive additives could double the specific energy performance of lead acid batteries (i.e. from 30-35 Wh/kg to 60-70 Wh/kg). However, the exact size of the additive required to accomplish this improvement has never been verified. They therefore suggest some possible experiments to determine the particle size and the amount of additive material needed to make this dramatic improvement in specific energy.