Gems in the Dust

Revolutionary battery will make electric cars practical

by Kimberly Chapple

The call came in and the voice at the other end said, "You really ought to think about designing a new battery, Al. They've already developed pretty good motors and controllers to make the electric car practical, but they need a better battery." Click.

So began inventor Alvin Snaper's thinking of ways to achieve The Practical: Make a light battery with a quick recharge rate that is economical to produce and environmentally-friendly. And it looks like he and his crack design team--septuagenarians and octogenarians plucked from retirement in the sands of Las Vegas--have done it.

Inventor Alvin Snaper with batteries

Snaper, a Designfax reader whose first patent was used to make TANG and whose second was the IBM Selectric ball, is a self-described interdisciplinary type who struck out on his own after getting pats-on-the-back and "attaboys" for his inventions from his first two employers. Since then, he's received more than 600 patents on devices ranging from an aircraft collision avoidance system to an implantable pedia-cardia heart pump.

Three-quarters of Snaper's hand-selected Power Technology, Inc., Las Vegas, NV, team are retired engineers, chemists and scientists in their 70s or 80s who once worked at the nearby Nevada Test Site or for other area engineering concerns like Hughes Aircraft. "There was a tremendous amount of experience just sitting around in rocking chairs," says Snaper. "My chief mechanical engineer, just to keep himself busy, was working as a security guard. I told him to 'come on back and do what you like to do,'" he laughs.

And now the teammates may be laughing themselves to the bank. Their creation is a foam structure that Snaper believes will take a standard lead-acid battery, reduce the lead content by 90%, and make it twice as powerful, half the size, environmentally-friendly and cost-effective...quite practical for the electric car market. And they came up with this application by accident, as they weren't even working on lead-acid batteries. (Yes, he's still laughing.)

About two years ago, Snaper and his crew set out to update Thomas Edison's original nickel-iron alkaline battery used to power the first electric vehicles 100 years ago. While the invention of the electric starter and subsequent production of the internal combustion engine for the Model T doomed the electric car to obscurity, Edison's battery continued to be used in trains and electric buses. Meantime, the lead-acid battery as we know it today was produced along side of Edison's. And it's been used ever since.

The Power Technology Battery Design

"When Edison did it, he made extremely good batteries, with extremely long lives," explains Snaper, adding that there are 70-year-old Edison batteries that are still as good as new. When asked why no one's tried to enhance this quality design before, Snaper remarks that like the "gems in the dust" that make up his design team, he believes there are a lot of "little technological kernels and gems that have been left in the dust," overlooked as we race through technology's advances. By applying advances in materials science and electrochemical engineering, he was able to revisit the Edison battery design that had been produced commercially at the turn of the century.

To update the nickel-iron battery, the team divided the job into two tasks: 1) develop the structure, and 2) develop the chemistry. "It so happened that we finished the structure first, and we got that patent issued," explains Snaper, "and we suddenly realized that 'Hey, this structure is applicable to any battery chemistry,'" including the industry standard lead-acid battery.

Comparison of Existing Electric Vehicle Battery Types with the Power Technology Battery (click image for enlargement)

Snaper's target immediately shifted. The team halted work on developing nickel-iron chemistry in order to devote itself to getting foam structure into the much larger lead-acid chemistry market where the structure can be manufactured as a drop-in replacement for today's car battery. Snaper expects to hand manufacturing and marketing of the team's design to an OEM, so that the team can go on to finish the nickel-iron battery they started and "three or four other projects we're working on," he explains. (giggle, giggle, ka-ching, ka-ching)

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