Numerical and Experimental Study of Lead-Acid Battery

Lead-Acid battery was the earliest secondary battery to be developed. It is the battery that is most widely used in applications ranging from automotive to industrial storage. Nowadays it is often used to store energy from renewable energy sources. There is a growing interest to continue using Lead-Acid batteries in the energy systems due to the recyclability and the manufacturing infrastructure which is already in place. Due to this rising interest, there is also a need to improve the efficiency and extend the life cycle of Lead-Acid batteries. To achieve these objectives, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of the physics taking place within individual batteries. A physics based computational model can be used to simulate the mechanisms of the battery accurately and describe all the processes that are happening inside; including the interactions between the battery elements, based upon the physical processes that the model takes into account. In the present paper, we present a discharge/charge experimental study that has been carried out with small Lead-Acid batteries (with a capacity of 7 Ah). The experiments were performed with a constant current rate of 0.1C [A]1 for two different battery arrangements. An in-house zero dimensional model was developed to perform simulations of Lead-Acid batteries under different operating conditions. A validation analysis of the model was executed to confirm the accuracy of the results obtained by the model compared to the aforementioned experiments. Additional simulations of the battery were carried out under different current rates and geometry modifications in order to study how the performance of the battery may change under these conditions.