Improving Lead Acid Battery Performance  

Beyond Zero Emissions has an interview (podcast) with Mil Ovan of Firefly Energy on improving lead acid battery technology - Mil Ovan of Firefly Energy speaks about their microcell technology that improves traditional lead acid battery peformance parameters.

Scott Bilby: We're talking with Mil Ovan, senior vice-president of Firefly Energy, a company that has developed a carbon graphite foam grid technology that increases the performance of lead acid batteries and reduces the amount of lead used. The technology has the potential to improve a wide range of market segments including transportation, construction, computer back up systems, just to name a few and also with significant cost savings. Welcome to the show Mil.

Mil Ovan: Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it.

Scott: It's a joy having you on the show. We're interested in the name 'Firefly' and where it came from.

Mil: What's interesting about Firefly is that as I was thinking about the attributes of the technology, what words would capture it the best. It turns out I looked through the entire Thesaurus looking for names starting from A to Z and the short story is my daughter who was very young got up at 3 o'clock and wanted a bottle, I couldn't sleep after feeding her and I picked up the thesaurus and the first thing I saw in 'F' was Firefly and I said, that's it; but I went through all the way to Z anyway to figure out if there wasn't one that was even better. But when you think of a firefly it's very captivating, very illuminating, obviously a great power to weight ratio and also with the tip, it's very green and what we're doing with this firefly technology is replacing the heavy, corrodible, very non-conductive, lead metal grid in a lead-acid battery with this light-weight high surface foam material that now allows batteries to run longer, last longer be lighter, smaller in volume and much more environmentally responsive with the reduction in the amount of lead used in lead acid batteries. ...

Scott: And on that topic it kind of reminds us of the origin of the work done into the batteries from caterpillar. Is that correct?

Mil: Yes, the technology was incubated there, and it's a kind of interesting story. How is it that the company that makes earth moving equipment for a living come up with the Holy Grail of battery technology? Well, it turns out that Caterpillar has long used lead-acid batteries in their earth movers and you can't imagine a more abusive environment for a battery than something that shakes violently and is used in temperature extremes and is used infrequently like a battery in a CAT bulldozer, but they decided around the 2000 timeframe that they were going to put the Caterpillar name on those lead-acid batteries that they had long sourced from their current supplier and when they did that customers started to complain. They said, 'Hey, what's with this Caterpillar ruggedness that we've come to know and expect. These lead-acid batteries are failing, how would you fix them?' And that same battery had been sourced before by Caterpillar, so the customers' expectation really got heightened when the CAT name was put on that.

So, they went back to their existing base of lead-acid battery suppliers and said, 'How would you fix these problems? The battery kernel…unintelligible 05.13... at an accelerated rate of heights…unintelligible 05.16... you let the battery sit uncharged it sulfates up and you can't get the battery to accept the charge. How would you solve those problems?'

Not surprisingly, the answers coming back to Caterpillar weren't very sufficient from the lead-acid battery company, because when you think about it the last major innovation in lead-acid batteries, and by the way this technology was created in 1859, the last major innovation was not having to add water to your battery. Well, that's a big yawn because that was twenty, thirty years ago. So, when they reached the limits about what they can do with a lead-acid battery with the lead grid in it, they got rid of their R & D teams and their sophisticated test equipment and they started to look at other chemistries like nickel metal hydride and lithium.

So, Caterpillar instead, having found those answers to be not sufficient, turned inward to their own research and development arm, and Caterpillar probably spends about $600, $700 million a year on research and development, and an enterprising materials scientist named Kurt Kelley was given the task of designing a better lead acid battery. The good news, as it turns out, was that he had never designed a battery before so therefore he wasn't constrained with conventional wisdom about what you should and should not do to a battery, and one of those things that according to battery company wisdom was you shouldn't add carbon to a battery. Well, Kurt, as a materials scientist, knew that there was a broad spectrum of carbons, and that the battery industry only tried one, and Kurt tried an entirely different kind of carbon. And that overcame, therefore, the limitations in terms of runtime life that was posed by those who used lead metal and lead-acid batteries. So, that's really the essence of the innovation and in May, 2003 the technology was spun out to my partner and I as well as the chief scientist, whose also co-founder, and Firefly was founded in May, 2003.

Matthew: Now, for our listeners, they're familiar with the battery when it comes to lead –acid batteries, the battery in their motor vehicle, in their car, and now obviously, initially you'll be selling into some other markets, we can talk about those in a second, but I'm just interested in knowing, comparing it to what's in a car, like a flooded wet cell battery of a certain density that can deliver a certain amount of power to run your car, like how much lead is in a Firefly battery versus the one in our car, and how much more power can you get out of a Firefly battery than the kind of battery that's in a car at the moment?

Mil: Sure, and that's an interconnected question. In Australia you probably don't face extreme colds, but in more northern climates, typically in the winter, your battery is double-sized to account for the big drop in capacity when the cold temperatures hit. So, depending on your geography, this could be a third to a quarter less in size than a classic lead-acid battery.

It all depends on the application. You know, today's lead-acid battery isn't asked to do much in a car application, but that's quickly changing. You look in Europe, the E.U. wants to implement very stringent CO2 reductions on automobiles, and if the car manufacturer doesn't meet those by a certain timeframe they're going to get penalised 90 euros per car as a result. So, there's a dramatic shift to what are called micro-hybrid vehicles whereby you pull up to a busy stop light in Paris, you push in the clutch, the engine goes off, you let your foot off the brake after the light changes and the engine comes on again. And that's already been seen to reduce the amount of fuel consumption and pollution significantly.

However, the problem is the normal lead-acid battery isn't used to being started that many moment your Firefly technology, nickel metal hydrides, or these new lithium ion batteries times, you know instead of starting once when you drive your car home from work, you might be starting the vehicle 20-30 times during that commute and that's a very punishing application, particularly since when you're at that stop you still want to have your accessories running, now that has to run off the battery as a result rather than off the alternator. So, the situation with cars is going to be significantly changing and your father's lead-acid battery isn't going to be suitable for these new vehicles that are soon to be coming to the world.

"Switch off Hazelwood. Switch off Coal. Switch on Renewables" is a day of fun, creative and inspiring direct community action at Hazelwood coal power station.

Coal burning power stations are one of the main contributers to climate change, and Hazelwood is one of the dirtiest in the industrialised world.

On Sunday September 13th, 2009 people from across Victoria, and Australia, will come together for a day of peaceful community mass civil disobedience to Switch off Hazelwood and Switch off Coal – we will be taking direct action for renewable energy.