Technical Paper
The Bipolar Nickel-Metal Hydride Battery for Advanced Transportation and High Voltage Power and Energy Storage Systems
2006-11-07
2006-01-3020
Electro Energy Inc. (EEI) has been developing its patented bipolar version of nickel metal hydride rechargeable batteries since the company was founded in 1992. The design of the battery is based on flat wafer cells, resulting in high power and energy densities, and leading to reduced weight and costs as well as increased performance over existing rechargeable battery technologies and other competing energy storage devices. Using this design approach, Electro Energy Inc. is developing and demonstrating batteries for multiple transportation applications including electric scooters, peaking batteries for hybrid electric vehicles, and high energy batteries for plug-in hybrids and various configurations of electric buses. For the hybrid peaking battery application the Toyota Prius was used as the test bed. The EEI bipolar battery is approximately 20% smaller in volume and is predicted to be more than 25% less costly than the OEM Prius NiMH battery.