Design and Development of a Multifunction Device for Lead Acid Batteries

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.

I. Introduction

Currently, great emphasis is placed on saving energy sources, environmental protection and overall sustainability [1], [2]. One possible way how to deal with this is undoubtedly recycling or extending the life of an existing equipment without the need to manufacture new one. Another way to save energies and materials is the production and use of multi-purpose devices instead of several single-purpose devices. Such multi-purpose devices can share some parts (functional blocks) instead of producing these blocks individually within each single-purpose device, so the whole device is more environmentally friendly and also the costs of such device will be lower compared to a number of single-purpose ones. Consequently, thanks to this, it is possible to save the material and energy needed to produce several single-purpose devices, regardless of the fact that such a device requires less transport or storage costs than several single-purpose devices, which again saves other resources, whether in energy or, for example, occupied land during the construction of storage areas [3].