July 19, 2024: The Alpha-Beta Society, an informal society of members who have made outstanding contributions to the development of lead–acid batteries, announced on July 16 that Frank Fleming had been elected as its 31st member.

The society, launched by David Rand and Ernst Voss, elects only one member per year.

“This is a totally unexpected and wonderful surprise! To be proposed and accepted as a member of such august and esteemed company is very humbling indeed. I would be absolutely delighted to accept,” said Frank.

“For the past 40 years Frank has been at the sharp end of research, manufacture and commercial development of the lead battery business,” said Jürgen Garche, grand-master of the society.

Fleming’s career has indeed been spectacular. While studying for his degree in applied chemistry he took a year’s work experience with Chloride, which was then one of the three top battery manufacturers in the world. Folklore had it that the sun never set in the Chloride empire — it had operations all around the globe.

It was also the stuff of legend. It was there that Frank came under the influence of Barry Culpin and Ken Peters — nowadays the man recognized as having been the pioneer of VRLA batteries and who turned the technology into a commercial phenomenon.

After graduating in 1978, he knew what he wanted to do and he went on to take a PhD in solid state proton conduction at Leeds University.

So, with doctorate in hand, he returned to work for Chloride, which later was to become Hawker Batteries, and for the next 19 years the firm was an integral part of his life.

His initial work was as an applied scientist for Chloride Technical, the R&D arm of the group.

Oddly, for a man whose career has been almost exclusively spent in the lead industry, for a time he was involved with Salford University and the Danish Energy Research Laboratory, studying secondary lithium batteries. This work resulted in the development of a lithium/PEO/V6O13 secondary button cell.

As his experience grew he became a member of a team of onsite trouble-shooters, whose role was to resolve local processing problems and to understand the unique electrochemical phenomena that disrupted the Chloride VRLA product.

During this time, he spent extended periods working in the South Africa and US manufacturing facilities on the Torque Starter, one of the first AGM batteries.

The early AGM batteries were plagued with problems — it was not just a Chloride difficulty but a worldwide one — which became labelled PCL, premature capacity loss. The cycle life of AGM batteries was found to decrease spectacularly in the early months of the batteries’ use. This was a huge problem, in particular, for Chloride, which was involved in huge potential sales for telecom companies.

Frank, with what became a later fabled group of people including Kathryn Bullock, Ken Peters, David Rand, Michael Myers, Pat Moseley and Russ Newnham, was one of the team recruited by the then newly formed ALABC to solve the problem.

During this time, Hawker acquired the Gates Company and Frank became involved in the development and manufacture of TPPL batteries. Thin plate pure lead batteries offer greater cycle life and deeper power.

Perhaps a key post in his career development was his appointment as technical director for Hawker Energy Products in 1989. Hawker was one wing of Chloride’s battery group and an iconic brand. Here his managerial skills were brought out in one of the toughest assignments of his early career.

This was the relocation of an entire manufacturing facility from London to Newport in south Wales, which included not just the introduction of new manufacturing processes and fundamental R&D but also maintaining the battery quality and for want of a better phrase, product integrity.

The next phase of his career was with his relocation to Warrensburg, Missouri in 1995. Hawker had acquired Gate’s Energy Products Inc. Here he became an integral member of the acquisition team and building a $25m extension.

By 1998 he had been promoted once more, this time to be global director for standby power. Here he was responsible for the strategic and technical direction of Hawker Batteries’ standby products for manufacturing facilities in Europe and the US.

This came to an end in 2000, when Frank became the co-founder and chief technical officer for NorthStar Batteries.

Frank looks back at that period of his life with a kind of amazement. “The first year of NorthStar was like starting from a completely white sheet of paper,” he told Batteries International in an earlier interview. “We had to think of what customers to approach, what design of the battery we would deploy, what size of battery and the like.”

In the event they designed and built a battery factory from scratch, focusing on telecoms batteries for the rapidly expanding cell phone market. “We saw there was an opportunity in this sector,” Frank says. “And we just went for it.”

NorthStar went on to become a highly successful manufacturer of advanced lead acid batteries for telecommunication, UPS and transportation applications.

In 2017 he took up the position of technical manager for Electric Applications Inc based in Phoenix Arizona. Frank further took on the role of technical manager for the Lead Battery Science Research Program (LBSRP) a US DoE sponsored project between Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and a consortium of US-based lead acid battery manufacturers.

The project — arguably the most exciting for a generation — uses the advanced techniques of ANL including the Synchrotron high energy X-ray source to study, in real time, the charging and discharging of lead cells.

The LBSRP is now heading into its seventh year and has been crucial in further understanding the fundamentals of the lead battery electrochemistry, and how to extend the cycle life of the lead battery to compete with other battery technologies.

In 2019 he received the 2019 International Lead Award, recognizing his outstanding lifetime contribution to the lead battery industry.

Frank continues to work with both the LBSRP and as a consultant with EAI, working on grid energy storage projects in the US and overseas. He says he sees this as a tremendous new market sector where lead batteries can dominate given their intrinsic safety, low cost and, as a result of the LBSRP research, potential high cycle life.