Lithium-Ion and Other Cell Chemistries 69 that do not recycle lead acid batteries to this same level. The other part of this equation that helps to drive high levels of recycling is that the used lead acid battery still has a residual value both to the end user and to the recycler. In this field, the used lead acid battery is most often resold back through a distribution center for a “core value,” which is the value of the raw materials used in the battery that can be reclaimed through the recycling process.
Another one of the frequent arguments for lead acid batteries is that there are many standard- ized sizes available, they have become highly “commoditized.” One method of categorizing the lead acid batteries was done by the Battery Council International (BCI) group numbers ( Table 2 ). While lead acid batteries are considered highly standardized and commoditized, the table below ( Table 2 ) clearly shows that there are a lot of variations to this “commodity” product, many of which are extremely close in either size or performance to other standard form factors.
This happens as new sizes are created that are specific to certain applications and to fit a wide range of products that span from small to very large. In addition to the dimensional characteristics that the BCI group numbers use to describe a lead acid battery, they also use voltage, terminal configuration, and position of the terminal to generate these categories. It is this combination of high levels of commoditization, low material and manufacturing costs, and high residual value of the lead acid battery that has helped to drive it to the low costs that it currently experiences.
As noted above, the traditional lead acid and VRLA lead acid battery is most frequently used in automotive SLI batteries. However, they have also found frequent use more recently in applications such as data storage centers and backup power sources as well as in some industrial applications such as forklifts. Another application where lead acid is frequently seen is in those requiring extremely low costs, such as the e-bike market. Lead acid is a good fit for applications that requires standby type power, high power pulses, low cycle requirements, does not have weight or volume restrictions and requires very low costs.
While the traditional lead acid battery has changed little over the past 150+ years, there is some new work being done on advanced lead acid batteries that is making some great strides and is making lead acid solutions more appropriate solutions for some of the newer electrifi- cation projects such as stop/start type microhybrids and mild HEVs. New companies such as Energy Power Systems (EPS) and Ecoult have both been working on advanced PbA solu- tions. EPS has developed what they refer to as a planar layered matrix solution.
EPS has taken an innovative approach to reimagining the lead acid battery and is achieving some extraordi- nary results claiming two to three times traditional lead acid cycle life as well as extremely high charge acceptance rates; in essence, they are achieving nearly NiMH performance at about one-third of the cost of NiMh. Targeting applications such as automotive microhybrids