TABLE OF CONTENTS A further development of the advanced lead-acid battery the VRLA battery has been the result of a worldwide collaborative effort since 1992 by lead producers, battery manufacturers, component suppliers and related industrial sectors joining together in the Advanced Lead-Acid Battery Consortium (ALABC). The Consortium started from the premise that there was still substantial development potential in the lead-acid battery. This had already been shown to some extent by the improvements made in battery performance by work already done on advanced lead-acid flooded battery technology and described in the previous section, and research undertaken on sealed bipolar lead-acid batteries at AEA at Harwell, UK. In the sealed bipolar technology the electrical resistance of the lead grids and the connectors between them is minimised by the use of a conducting plastic in the cell wall which permits low-loss transmission of current while maintaining the seal between the cells. The cell is sealed to atmosphere and relies on recombination processes in the battery and an increase in the size of the negative electrode to reduce the generation of hydrogen to a minimum. A jelly electrolyte is also used to avoid stratification. An energy density of 50 Wh/kg and a power density of 900 W/kg have been claimed for this technology [1].
The interest of the ALABC when they started was in improving specific energy and therefore range per charge, but it was soon appreciated that this is much less of a problem if it is possible to...
