Advanced bipolar lead-acid battery for hybrid electric vehicles

A large size 80 V bipolar lead acid battery was constructed and tested succ essfully with a drive cycle especially developed for a HEV. The bipolar bat tery was made using the bipolar plate developed at TNO and an optimised pas te developed by Centurion. An empirical model was derived for calculating t he Ragone plot from the results from a small size 12 V bipolar lead-acid ba ttery. This resulted in a specific power of 340 W/kg for the 80 V module. T he Ragone plot was calculated at t = 5 and t = 10 s after the discharge sta rted for current densities varying from 0.02 to 1.2 A/cm(2). A further deve lopment of the bipolar lead-acid battery will result in a specific power of 500 W/kg or more. From the economic analysis we estimate that the price of this high power battery will be in the order of 500 US$/kWh. This price is substantially lower than for comparable high power battery systems. This m akes it an acceptable candidate future for HEV. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B .V. All rights reserved.