Innovative lead-acid batteries with nanostructured electrodes

Abstract

Commercial lead-acid batteries should only be cycled slowly to guarantee a long life-time. Thus, their widespread application in energy storage or grid frequency stabilization systems, where high C-rates are required, is mostly restricted. These factors, along with their incredibly advantageous specific energy (Wh/kg), are making lithium-ion batteries a near-universal replacement for lead-acid batteries. Present lead-acid batteries can only really be used to start the engines of regular cars and a few other oddball devices like golf carts, forklifts, UPS systems, and so forth. The lithium-ion battery has several other advantages besides its high specific energy and power density (W/L), like its long service life even under high-speed cycling and constant updating. Novel lead-acid batteries based on nanostructured Pb and PbO2 electrodes offer a potential remedy in this re-gard. These electrodes maintain the benefits of commercial lead-acid batteries, including long life, safety, and nearly complete (up to 95%) recyclability of the materials used to build the bat-tery. They also allow a very high C-rate (charging times of approximately 3 minutes) due to their high surface area and high utilization of the active material. As a result, this new technology has a wide range of applications, including power grid management systems, automotive, renewable en-ergy storage, and storage systems that enable quick charging of electric cars, which are becoming more and more popular. In this work, we show a 6V battery with nanostructured electrodes tested at 10C. Very good stability for a high number of cycles and a discharge efficiency of around 90% was obtained. Important-ly, the C-rate tested here is far higher than that of commercial batteries, whose maximum operat-ing rate is C/5.