With the world looking for alternative energy and automobiles that can get us where we want to go without using fossil fuels and adding to the pollutions problems, hybrid cars can be a good alternative to the cars most people are driving now.

One of the main drawbacks or the hybrid cars has been their batteries.  The typical battery – a lead acid battery – can store a great amount of energy, however there are also problems associated with them.  When they are charged and discharged repeatedly, as in turning on and off a car engine, the battery gradually fills with deposits of chemicals, which coat the inside of the battery.  These deposits make the battery wear out much faster.

Researchers have been looking for a battery that will not have those problems, and a company named CSIRO out of Australia has created the Ultra Battery.  The Ultra Battery combines a lead acid battery with a supercapacitor.  The Ultra Battery will store as much energy as a regular lead acid battery without the battery plate getting coated with deposits that make it wear out sooner.  The capacitor acts as a buffer during charging and discharging so that this does not happen and the life of the battery is extended.

During testing, the Ultra Battery lasted 4 times as long as the lead acid battery and drove over 185,000 km without any problems.  The Ultra Battery was still in good shape with plenty of energy left to keep running. 

Cost has been another worry regarding batteries for hybrid cars.  The Ultra Battery should solve that problem as well.  The projected cost of the Ultra Battery is about one-third to one-fourth of NiMH batteries and only one-sixth of what the lithium ion batteries used on higher powered electric cars cost.  A couple of Battery manufacturers in Japan and the United States have begun the process of modifying their plants so that they can begin manufacturing the Ultra Battery, making it available sometime next year.

Tags: alternative energy, car battery, fossil fuel, Hybrid Cars, ultra battery

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Gas Prices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.