February 27, 2020: Battery Council International has closed its annual innovation award contest and the judging panel met on February 24 to assess the merits of this year’s entries. The result of the 13 applications and the winner of the award and two runners-up will be announced on April 27, the opening day of the BCI annual conference.

The panel consists of Dick Amistadi, a well known US veteran of the lead industry, Don Karner, president of Electric Applications Inc and a key figure in the liaison work between National Argonne Laboratory and the US lead battery industry, Boris Monahov, former chief technical officer of ALABC before his retirement, and Geoffrey May, a long time consultant to the lead battery business.

This year’s conference is being held in Henderson, a resort close to Las Vegas.

The 13 nominations are:

• 1-800-Battery. This is the first e-commerce marketplace/Saas platform that focuses on the problems of retailing lead acid batteries on the internet. (Saas stands for software as a service.) It says it is the pioneer of a disruptive business model — connecting geolocated consumers with independent retail brick and mortar and mobile service providers. The service was launched last November.
• Abertax. The company says it already has a successful electrolyte level sensor in its product line. This presently carries a lead probe. The latest development replaces the lead with composite carbon fibre. This has health and safety advantages and contributes to a greener environment.
• Arc Active. This New Zealand firm has re-engineered the negative electrode of the battery to remove the lead grid and replace it with a non-woven carbon fibre fabric called AACarbon. This solves the number one technical challenge facing the industry — achieving high and sustained dynamic charge acceptance while delivering very low water consumption. The product will be launched this year.
• CMWTEC Technologie. This is an advanced high rate discharge test machine with integrated impedance and DC internal resistance measurement for automotive lead-acid batteries. This new feature presents a new approach of an end-of-line test machine in terms of its assembly, programming flexibility and the ability to accurately discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable batteries. The product was announced in September 2018.
• Daramic. Daramic has invested heavily in research to understand how the separator may influence achieving CBI battery targets in partial state of charge cycle life, dynamic charge acceptance, water loss and corrosion. This has led to the development of a separator that increases acid to the negative, prevents active material swelling, and adds carbon that intimately contacts the negative plate. The latest product was launched last September.
• Flow-Rite Controls. The Flow-Rite sensor suite measures, collects and tracks the characteristics of a deep cycle battery pack. These sensors allow one to manage the care of deep cycle batteries either wirelessly or through a vehicle’s on-board computer. This enables it to monitor, track and control a fleet 24/7.
• An individual entry from Chittaranjan and Jayanta Ghosh. This is a battery charging method which includes a combination of CC (constant current) and CV (constant voltage) modes to reduce the emission of harmful gases, conserve electrical energy and extend the life of flooded type lead acid batteries during jar formation of VRLA batteries. Initial charging is done in CC mode to achieve a higher state of charge. This product was launched this January.
• Mega Amps International. EQLYTE (pronounced ee-kew-lite) optimizes electrochemical hydrodynamics within flooded lead acid cells, yielding increased discharge capacity and active material utilization. Electrolyte optimization is conducive to 25%-35% more discharge capacity and improves the PbSO₄ solubility, facilitating a more efficient charge and discharge process with less raw material usage. The product was introduced in August last year.
• Power Sonic. The e-co2tainer (pronounced Ecotainer) is a mobile unit where drivers can charge their electric cars at project locations. The required electricity is generated with solar panels and wind turbines on top of the unit and a generator placed inside the unit that works exclusively on biofuel. The firm says it is a completely independent off-grid solution. The product was launched last November.
• PRO Charging Systems. The battery optimization system is an active balancer for multiple batteries in a series configuration. The optimization system will keep the batteries balanced during charge, discharge and rest. This allows for greater run times as well as prolonging battery life by means of energy shuttling, which can be monitored via wireless communication to a phone or tablet with the ProView Link app.
• TBS Engineering. This is an automatic plate loader — effectively automation equipment to load positive and negative plates into a stacker without human intervention. The equipment scans a pallet of plates to determine the position of the stacks, lifts the stack and loads the plates into a plate shuffler designed to stop the plates from sticking together. The shuffler then loads the plates into the feeders of the stacker. Plate loading speeds of up to 360 per/min are possible.
• Very. A collaboration between Interstate Batteries and Very to design and build an IoT-powered inventory management system to track the location of batteries in retail stores and mechanic shops across the US, this new system allows drivers to use much smaller, more fuel- efficient trucks and drive shorter routes because of the more efficient inventory management the solution enables. The product was launched in July 2018.
• Wirtz Group of Companies. The RTR is a lead acid battery breaking and separation system and is a complete, fully assembled, piped, and electrically integrated, skidded breaking and separation system that can be shipped worldwide, installed and started up in less than a day, does not require special foundations, and can be run by a single operator. RTR stands for ready to run. The product was launched in September.