Lead acid battery

Rechargeable batteries are of great importance to many industrial sectors such as the electrical power industry and automotive industry. One class of such batteries is lead-acid based batteries. A lead acid battery is a storage battery using lead dioxide in the positive electrode and lead in the negative electrode as active materials, and dilute sulfuric acid as an electrolyte. The advantages of lead-acid batteries include: low cost of manufacture, simplicity of design, reliability and relative safety when compared to other electrochemical systems. Lead-acid batteries and cells have been known for a substantially long period of time and have been employed commercially in a relatively wide variety of applications. Such applications have ranged from starting, lighting and ignition for automobiles, trucks and other vehicles to marine and golf cart applications and to various stationary and motive power source applications. Lead-acid cells and batteries have been used in stationary battery applications wherein the lead-acid cells and batteries provide stand-by power in the event of a power failure. Lead-acid batteries have also been increasingly used in "on-the-road" and "off-the-road" electrical vehicles for forklift trucks, automated guided vehicles, and pure electric vehicles, whereby these batteries supply all the energy requirements. p>