01/18/06 - New FireFly super Battery uses Carbon Foam Current Collectors The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued patent number 6,979,513, titled, "Battery Including Carbon Foam Current Collectors." The patent was awarded on December 27, 2005. The invention is a battery comprised of an electrical current collector constructed of carbon or lightweight graphite foam. This foam exhibits a sizeable increase in surface area for chemical reactions to take place and eliminates the need for heavy lead plates found in traditional batteries. The graphite material resists corrosion and sulfation build-up, thus contributing to longer battery life and is lighter in weight than today's lead acid batteries. Kelley was assigned the problem of pursuing increased performance for lead-acid batteries used by Caterpillar's product groups. The challenges that Kelley faced were manifold. First among them were how to address the main performance challenges of a lead acid battery: -- Short life caused by corrosion (of the battery's positive plate) and sulfation (of the battery's negative plate). -- Removing the bottlenecks to realizing the theoretical power and capacity of the lead acid chemistry itself. "By removing the corrosive heavy lead grids and replacing them with a graphite foam, Kurt Kelley's invention has helped unleash the innate power of lead acid chemistry," adds Williams. "It introduces a material that doesn't corrode and enables the weights and sizes of lead acid batteries to be reduced significantly." FireFly Batteries http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060117006... http://www.fireflyenergy.com/ffy.html
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