Do the amps produced by other types of batteries compare with lead acid? I know you can get Lion battery's for a motorcycle, but don't know about a car?
The great thing about lead acid type is they are highly recycled because of the lead in them, but are other types recyclable or just disposed of?
So...not a great premise.
I've got a complex answer for you...but if you want to tune out then the answer is that's not how that works.
The long bit. I'm assuming that you've got a background in automotive of some sort. The terminology there is a bit different, but I'll provide a brief overview.
Cold Cranking Amps - The amount of energy that can be pulled from a storage device functionally instantly without damaging it
Energy Capacity - The total potential energy stored in the battery
Voltage - The difference in electronegativity between charged and ground state
Your voltage is determined by your chemistry. Basically, what you're doing is storing potential energy as chemical energy. In a lead-acid battery that's generally lead plates, stored in a solution of sulphuric acid. Consider the potential stored as Pb+ ions, H+ ions, and SO4- ions. This is that pesky high school chemistry stuff, where you looked up the electronegativity of stuff in huge tables. What you'll discover is that the reaction generates about 12 volts one way (with multiple chemical cells linked in series), and requires about 14 volts the other way to return to a charged state. This is why our charging voltages (in a car) are about 14 off of the alternator, but you've got 12 volts to actually use coming from the battery.
Energy capacity is a function of internal volumes and reactive surfaces. That's obtuse, so it may be easier to think of this as how much electrolyte you've got in the battery, which is really what is storing the charge. The catch on this is that there are practical limitations...hence why you cannot just make a lead acid battery with nearly pure sulfuric acid and boost capacity. Primarily, the electrolyte solution is also acting as a huge heat capacitor. Generally this means that your construction technique, and battery size, are what will influence energy capacity.
Now, the cold cranking amps. Unfortunately, this is going to be chemistry and reactive surfaces. Let's talk about why your car uses lead-acid. If you've got a big plate of lead, beaten out into a fine surface, there's a huge surface area inside the battery. One the flip side, the lead plate is a pain to deal with and requires additional construction techniques so as to not decompose when chemical reaction sites are inconsistent.
Less nerd speak, more practical speak. There's such a thing as a high cold cranking amp battery and a deep cycle battery. Why? One has thin plates, can convert a bunch of energy quickly due to having such a huge chemically reactive surface, but doesn't have an insane overall storage. The other has a much higher storage quantity, but cannot allow a huge draw because more of its internal space is dedicated to the energy storage medium. Lead-acid is great because both of these are possible, and a pain because given the chemistry they can't exactly store nutty amounts of power. Easy come-easy go.
Now, why not install lithium polymer batteries on cars? There are three reasons, so I'll summarize:
1) Cost. The cost of a lead acid battery is pennies when compared to a lithium polymer one. Old tech ain't bad.
2) Energy delivery. Lead-acid relies on huge electrode plates, meaning they can deliver their load faster without decomposing their internal chemistry. Lead-acid does off-gas hydrogen and volatile stuff just like li-ion and li-po. That said, when was the last time you saw a lead-acid battery pop? Only one in my lifetime, after being cranked to the moon for weeks and being underspeced.
3) Recharging. So, anyone that has any automotive background has had a trickle charger. Old cars were dumb, and people left lights on. Trickle charge the battery, take a half hour drive, and everything is right as rain. Why? Well, the engine sustains itself while running off of the charge from the alternator. The alternator is constantly charging the battery. They tolerate that well. li-po and li-ion don't...which is why they have specific charging circuits that deactivate once they detect the battery is full.
Now, the fringe benefits:
1) Lead-acid is stupid easy to recycle. There's a reason your get a core charge for them. Empty acid, wash, smelt old plates into new ones, reinstall acid, and you've got a "new" battery with about 2 new components. That is the plastic container and the terminals.
2) High tolerance for high temperatures. So...li-po and li-ion don't like freezing. They don't like temperatures near boiling. They don't like to sit next to stuff that goes from freezing to near boiling during regular operations. Lead acid basically tanks all of this.
3) Huge electrodes are cheap. We're looking at surface areas for chemical reactions to occur on. In a li-ion and li-po battery these are basically the electrodes jammed into them. Not a lot of surface area, so they generally have much smaller instantaneous power delivery. That's fine if you don't want your phone to explode in your pocket. It's not so fine when you have to charge a motor that compresses gas to 10-12:1 ratios before delivering a high potential spark to ignite the mixture and start combustion.
4) The infrastructure. I...will give this to Tesla. They have made li-ion batteries easier to source for themselves. It hasn't done great things for consumers...but it was a good direction. Now let's look at lead acid. Cores come in, and require minimal labor and parts to replace. New batteries are made through smelting of a relatively low temperature lead, and usage of sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is an industrial by-product used in plenty of places. This means that getting lead acid batteries is an order of magnitude easier...and ironically more environmentally friendly.
5) Yes, I said environmentally friendly. That's despite the massive fume hoods and other requirements to smelt lead. Funny that. Lithium extraction requires removal or ore, processing with acids to remove the unwanted slag, chemical reconstitution of the Lithium into a usable form, and fabrication of a cell. Recycling is a joke...because those cells yield compounds that volatilize in an oxygen environment and have potentially off-gassed much of their relatively costly bits due to the love of fast charging and overcharging. In short, they often don't see recycling because the environment and qualifications to recycle them basically price them out of being economical. This is despite just railing on about how expensive they are to make. Go figure.
So...it is possible to design a li-ion or li-po battery to replace a lead acid one. It'll have a shorter life. It'll have a larger number of cells, so that enough amperage can safely be pulled at once. Because of all of those cells, it'll probably be heavier than the lead acid alternative. It will require much greater temperature controls to prevent decay during usage. It'll require a complex charging circuit, and will be far more prone to failure if cranked multiple times in a row (given how the charging circuit will have to work).
In short, it can be done. It is not because for every good things there are three bad things. Ironically, old school tech is infinitely more suited to things than newer stuff.
-I laugh at this as I review. Right now, inside your car, is likely an air filter. It probably has an expanded metal mesh, embedded in an isomer, with a paper filter. The isomer is a 10+ year old formulation. The metal mesh is created on machines from the 1920's. The paper filter is largely indistinguishable from those found in the 1950's. It's amazing how much "archaic" stuff exists. It's also amazing that despite having all this time to design new stuff, often times the old ways are still economically the best.
I'd say there's irony in being on a tech forum stating that new tech is not a solution. That said, I recognize that newer is often confused with better. I then crack open a cheap UPS and discover a series of lead acid batteries...and find it amusing that what we trust is different than what we think. Food for thought.-
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