Design and development of a multifunction device for lead acid batteries

Abstract

All machines rely on some source of energy and they are very often supported by batteries. Despite the newly developed Lithium-based batteries there is still a great number of applications where the lead acid batteries prevail. Moreover, according to some studies their usage will not drop significantly in the near future and may even grow. Therefore, there is and will be a demand for devices that would prolong their life-time and in this way contribute to sustainable materials, products and processes globally. This contribution presents one such device developed at the Department of Process Control, Faculty of Applied Informatics, Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic. It not only enables the complete care of lead acid batteries, including their capacity recovery, but it offers other functionalities as well. As our results indicate so far, the lost lead acid batteries capacity can be significantly recovered using this device and this recovered capacity can be also verified by the same device. The reached recovery can be even over 40 percent. This microcomputer-driven device is already patented and it is in the process of commercialization, however, its further development is not closed yet and other features, discussed in this paper, could be added in the close future by our team.