Sunday, March 25, 2012

changes in Batteries ....

I have enjoyed reading John Peterson's comments in Seeking Alpha (a stock pickers web site) and the comments from other readers ( at the bottom of the article

Have a look at part .....

The simplest, cheapest and most direct approach is adding fine carbon powders to the sponge lead pastes used in the negative electrodes of first- and second-generation lead-acid batteries. Extensive testing over the last decade has shown that changing the paste formulation to include up to 6% carbon by weight (±30% by volume) offers excellent cycleability and power while significantly reducing charging times.
Johnson Controls (JCI), Exide Technologies (XIDE) and several other companies are already using carbon paste additives in enhanced versions of their flooded and AGM batteries with notable success. Others will follow. While carbon enhanced batteries have slightly lower specific energy than their predecessors, their 100 to 200 percent increase in cycle-life reduces the cost of energy storage by 30 to 50 percent.
A more complex approach is the Ultrabattery from CSIRO, Furukawa Battery and East Penn Manufacturing. It divides each negative electrode into two parts, a lead half and a carbon half. The end result is superior cyclability and power with even shorter charging times. The Ultrabattery is being tested in a variety of stationary and micro-hybrid applications and shows significant promise, including the potential to reduce the cost of energy storage by 50 to 70 percent.
The third and most sophisticated approach is the PbC battery from Axion Power International (AXPW.OB) that replaces the lead-based negative electrodes used in conventional batteries with a carbon electrode assembly. The resulting device is an "asymmetric lead-carbon capacitor" that offers the energy storage of a battery and the power and cycleability of a capacitor in a single hybrid device.


Hang in there -- the Lead Acid battery has much life --


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