A Study on the Simplification of Manufacturing Process of Tubular Batteries to Overcome CRISIS of Lead-Acid Battery Maker in KOREA

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Manufacturers of lead-acid batteries have made great efforts to reduce the production cost of batteries. Simplifying the manufacturing process is an effective way to reduce costs. In general, it has been recognized that tubular electrode plates should be pickled after filling with the positive active material(PAM). This process requires a pickling and drying process. During this process, curing of the active material occurs. Generally, the curing process is the most time-consuming part of the lead-acid battery manufacturing process. This study deals with the simplification of the manufacturing process for lead-acid batteries using a tubular type positive plate. The effect on discharge capacity of pickling and curing time for the tubular plate was investigated. In this study, tubular positive plates filled with the active material were subjected to case formation(CF) by assembling the cell without pickling. The investigation illustrated that pickling conditions were a determinant for modifications of the chemical and phase composition of the PAM and for electrochemical performance. Thus, a better under-standing of the pickling mechanism is required in order to optimize the tubular positive plate’s performance. It has been observed that the key to successful pickling is the maintenance of an exact balance between the con-centration of H2SO4, and the duration of the pickling process. The comparative study showed that longer pickling times and higher concentrations of H2SO4 do not necessarily result in electrodes with better first capacity perfor-mance. Also, it was noted that if the concentration of H2SO4 for pickling was too low or too high, the capacity of the battery was reduced. In this study, the best cell performance was obtained after 3 hours of pickling in H2SO4 solution with a specific gravity of 1.20 and after 16 hours of pickling in H2SO4 solution with a specific gravity of 1.10. This result will be commercially valuable to tubular type lead-acid battery manufacturers in terms of sim-plifying the manufacturing process.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Experiments 3. Results and Discussion 4. Conclusion 5. References