Turquoise Battery Project Talk - for Ideawave Feb. 26th 2012
Craig Carmichael
TurquoiseEnergy.com

* In January 2008 I started doing some great designs for electrifying cars. An electric car needs: batteries.

* My own NiMH AA cells all still worked after up to 11 years, and NiMH batteries had been a big success in hybrids and in the fine electric cars featured in "Who Killed the Electric Car?"
       

* But looking for the economical large ones, I read on Wikipedia that an oil company had acquired the battery company and over 100 patents for metal hydrides. They stopped production and won't let anyone make them.

* Big oil works very hard to prevent anyone from producing and selling good and economical batteries for electric cars.









* I'm going to digress a bit here - I did a good side project with NiMH D cells:

* In 2011 I came up with a way to build them up into big batteries - "Handy Battery Sticks", which I sell. At 300 $ for a car battery they're more costly than the big flooded cells would be, but it's a perfect drop-in, maintenance free car battery that should last 10 to 20 years instead of 3 to 5. It's green, saves gas by being 20 pounds lighter, and it's available now.


Handy Battery Sticks, 12 volt, 6 volt


30 D cells worth, 12 v, 30 AH, runs my car.
NiMH is a perfect drop-in replacement for lead-acid in cars.


Later I made "quintos battery sticks", 12 volters to fit properly where lead-acids used to go.


Still later I made 70 amp-hour, 12 volt "Super Battery Sticks" for electric cars.


* Now back to 2008. The Wikipedia revelation got my nose out of joint. Since then I've discovered that that's the most important use of patents today - thousands of them help corrupt vested interests keep things from changing, and our dysfunctional society just lets them do it.

* So along with the transport motor projects I decided to see if I could figure out some way to make batteries at home.
* I also hoped that as I learned I might uncover something overlooked and actually make a better battery.

* In a sense, batteries are almost an unknown art. Factories churn out lead-acid batteries that belong in the Smithsonian, and decent small cells, but few people know how to design and build a practical, working battery. Nobody explores new chemistries. I haven't heard of any battery making and design courses, and there's no textbooks.

* So the project has been mostly a lot of stumbling around.
* By persistence I made progress. I learned a lot of things the hard way. I came up with tools and techniques.

* Electrodes are made by mixing chemical powders and then compacting them around a conductive grill. What wasn't said anywhere was that they have to be compacted with tons of force, making them into something like a piece of rock - an electrode "briquette".

* No metal worked in my positive electrodes with my salt based chemistries. They all corroded away. Graphite sheets and carbon rods from dry cells were unsatisfactory. Finally I created "grafpoxy" last year, an equal mixture of epoxy and conductive graphite to coat wires and grills with, fairly conductive but protecting the metal beneath.

* I also found out that for higher voltage negative electrodes, the conductors have to be zinc, or they'll bubble hydrogen and discharge it. Over the years I've tried several metals, carbon rods and grafpoxy, all perplexing failures, before I finally discovered this property casually mentioned in something I read.

* Finally I started coming up with real, practical answers to put everything together in... February 2012. Yes, this month.
* One gradual but growing realization has been that the hard part of making a battery is to physically construct electrodes and cells that work - the chemistry chosen is a mere detail. I finally went for flooded, vented cells to get things going.

* I took an 1880's idea, perforated metal pocket electrodes, and reinvented it in a new form: Perforated Hard Plastic Pocket Electrodes. These encapsulate the electrodes to keep them from swelling up and disintegrating when first immersed in the cell. The perforations let electrolyte pass through.

The critical tool to make these would be something that could make thousands of tiny holes in a sheet of fairly hard plastic in minutes rather than hours or days. That turned out to be.....








* A scucum sewing machine. It made perforated plastic pocket electrodes practical, and for homemade, the simple construction is the difference between frustration and success..

* They can be made most easily as square cylinders with a wire running through them.









* The square cylinders are formed by heating the plastic in an oven or with a heat gun and bending it around a square metal rod. The powder is compacted straight into it with a metal punch and a hammer.



  

* I had to reduce the electrode size from these 1/2" square ones to 1/4", as the conductivity was just too low. But a cell can have as many electrodes in a checkerboard pattern as you want.



* Traditional flat plate electrode shapes are also possible as perforated pockets.


* And I did come up with some better chemistries. I'll skip straight to the best ones:

* Potassium chloride salt electrolyte is safer than caustic potassium hydroxide, yet the chemical reactions seem to be regular hydroxide reactions.

* I made a working manganese negative electrode, which I had been trying to do for some time. The key was to inhibit hydrogen generation by adding 1% antimony sulfide. This didn't seem to work until I found out about needing zinc metal. It has high energy - high voltage and high amp-hours, and should have very long cycle life. It brings cell voltage to 2 volts.

* I also made an improved nickel electrode chemistry, nickel manganate, two days ago. It uses less of the somewhat costly element nickel to get the same amp-hours. It delivers better current drive by being more conductive.

* Yesterday afternoon, after 4 years, I finally got a weak but properly working 2 volt, green, cheap, high energy battery incorporating all these new chemical and construction ideas. In principle, most other types of larger batteries have just been made obsolete.

* My battery making book is on my TurquoiseEnergy.com website. I'm doing my best to keep it up to date with my fast-paced developments. I expect to be making practical batteries that really perform this spring, and I hope to offer battery making workshops by fall. Check at the website, and subscribe to Turquoise Energy News if you're interested. My cards and various samples are on display here this morning.
www.TurquoiseEnergy.com
Craig Carmichael
craig@saers.com --- 250 384 2626