The day we posted the Bi-polar Battery piece, we got a letter from Gerry Woolf of Energy Storage Publishing Ltd (ESPL). He’s the publisher of BEST Mag, based in a seaside town in the South of England called Worthing. BEST actually stands for batteries & energy storage technology. Clever.
Anyway, Woolf wasn’t writing to us about the article we just posted. He probably mailed it way before we even got the idea to blog about it, being overseas and all. So why was he writing?
Woolf was trying to let us know that Sally Miksiewicz’s family set up a competition for innovations within the lead acid sector. “In case you didn’t know,” he writes, “Sally was the only daughter of DeLight Briedigam, founder of East Penn manufacturing.” East Penn has been around for two generations, producing lead acid batteries. Sally was killed in 2014 in a car collision; she was jogging and the car driver was intoxicated. Her father DeLight died a year later. And, it turns out that DeLight also lost his son Timothy back in 1978. Sad shit. So, BEST Mag wants to commemorate their memories with the recognition of innovation. To that effect, the summer issue included the ESPL Sally Miksiewicz Award Supplement. I even thought that the award was initiated by ESPL. Clever!!
We will write later about some of these innovations in more detail (which ones seem most interesting to you?), but in the meanwhile you can watch this video and read the description below:
The innovations range from those in design: bipolar batteries, carbon nanotubes, silicon carbide, battery-in-pieces, and improvements to terminals; to those in manufacturing: speeding up gel battery filling, recycling innovations, improved stickers, and quicker curing and formation; and finally to consumer use improvements: hybrid lead-carbon in hybrid vehicles, apps for battery care, and smart (genius even) chargers.
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