Lead-Acid Battery: Foreword

1251 this development. The paper by D. E. Koontz, D. O. Feder, L. D. Babusci and H. J. Luer outlines the use of lead-acid cells in the Bell System and the difficulties experienced with the existing cells, and describes the new design. This paper makes clear that the principal problem with the existing design is the growth in size, with time on float, of the lead-calcium alloy positive grids. The following paper, by A. G. Cannone, Feder and R. V. Biagetti, shows how the grid growth problem has been substantially helped by the use of pure lead, and then still further reduced by designing the shape of the grid to obviate local budding. The third paper, by Biagetti and M. C. Weeks, describes the results of experiments with pure tetrabasic lead sulphate as the positive plate paste material instead of the proprietary mixture customarily used. Tetrabasic lead sulphate is shown to be less prone to shrinkage from the grid, because the lead dioxide crystals produced on forming tend to exist as a dense tangle of relatively large crystallites. The next paper, by P. C. Milner, summarizes what is known of the float characteristics of lead-acid cells, setting up a quantitative framework within which the float behavior of any lead-acid cell may be described by quoting a relatively small number of experimentally determinable parameters. T. D. O'Sullivan, Biagetti and Weeks next present the results of a series of electrochemical measurements on the new cell. They describe inter alia the float behavior and relate their results to Milner's analysis.