Battery makers

Battery makers sometimes view separators with disdain the separator is needed but does not actively contribute to battery operation. Consequently, very little work (relative to that on electrode materials and electrolytes) is directed towards characterizing separators. In fact, development efforts are under way to displace microporous membranes as battery separators and instead to use gel electrolytes or polymer electrolytes. Polymer electrolytes, in particular, promise enhanced safety by elimi-... 

McKeefry. H.L. The Heat s On for Battery Makers, Electronic Buyeis News. 30 (June 1. 1992). 

Europe s first fuel cell bus, the Eureka, made its much-delayed debut in Brussels near the end of 1994. First announced in 1988, the Eureka was an articulated 59-foot 80-passenger device whose fuel cell and other components were housed in a two-wheeled trailer almost as long as the bus itself. A hybrid with an 87-kilowatt alkaline fuel cell made by the Belgian Elenco company plus NiCad batteries from French battery maker SAFT, it had electrical traction equipment from Italy s Ansaldo and a liquid-hydrogen fuel system contributed by Air Products of the Netherlands. The bus itself came from Van Hool. In all, the partners and the member governments spent about 8 million to get the bus on the road before its demise a few months later. Elenco was forced into bankruptcy in the spring of 1995 when the shareholders refused to come up with additional cash its assets... 

In Germany, the battery maker Varta and the electrical equipment builder Siemens assembled a demonstrator version of a fuel-cell-powered boat with an electric motor. 

Furthermore, new players could appear on the automobile market, for instance battery makers or very big IT companies such as Google, which has been conducting an important research on self-driving cars for years. This could be possible since electric vehicles do not need any combustion motor, which still represents a particular capability of today s car makers. 

Actually polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) is one of the few polymers which meet most of the requirements, and it is the binder of choice for many battery makers. 

In Germany, the storage battery maker Varta, together with other organizations, started making AFC batteries with flowing electrolyte. Raney nickel was used at the anode and Raney silver at the cathode. Other than the electrodes of Justi and Winsel, the Varta electrodes included FIFE and had a mixed hydrophobic-hydrophilic structure. In their batteries with matrix electrolyte, Siemens also used skeleton catalysts, but included additional metals (titanium, bismuth, and others). 

Other Ingredients. The use of other materials (binders, additives, electrolyte) will depend on the particular manufacturing process used by the battery maker. The ultimate goal is to produce a dense, stable cathode, which has good electronic and ionic conductivity, and discharges efficiently even at high discharge rates. 

The ER is a more comprehensive measure of permeability than the Gurley number (air permeability) in that the measurement can be carried out in the actual electrolyte solution. Thus, the measurement reflects the compatibility of the separator with the electrolyte (e.g., the value of the ER will reflect pores that are nonwetting). The magnitude of the ER can be used to estimate ohmic losses in a cell. Unfortunately, ER is significantly more difficult to measure than air permeability. Battery makers may find evaluating the electrical performance of a spirally wound cell made with dummy electrodes and a particular separator an efficient means of measuring ER [60]. 

More important perhaps than the overall purity of the lead produced, are the strict requirements of battery makers for lead oxide containing acceptably low levels of a range of impurities, which would otherwise cause gassing in maintenance-free batteries. As a result, secondary producers now... 

Normally, the battery maker is presented with a given space into which the battery must fit. and this space is a compromise between overall design requirements and the need for a battery of sufficient size to make the vehicle a viable, economic proposition to the user. 

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