"Burping" the Battery

On some clear day in the distant fu ture, U.S. highways may be filled with si lent, exhaustless electric cars. For the time being, however, such an auto remains as elusive as unpolluted air. Those venerable vehicles of the early 1900s, the Baker and Detroit Electrics of pre-World War I days required many hours of battery recharging for every hour on the road. To this day, the "refueling" problem is one of the major obstacles holding up production of a commercially competitive electric car.

Engineers at Los Angeles' McCulloch Corp. believe that they may have found a solution. In an effort to improve McCulloch's portable electric-starting chain saw, they developed a new method of recharging ordinary nickel-cadmium batteries -- the same as those used in transistor radios, electric toothbrushes and other household appliances. Ordinarily, it takes as long as twelve to 15 hours to recharge such batteries from wall out lets. With their system, say the McCulloch engineers, the job can be done in ten to 15 minutes.

Because of the electrochemical reactions that occur inside a battery, it tends to give off internal gases and overheat whenever the charging current is drastically increased in order to save time. The result is a ruined battery. But by following a series of strong charging pulses with a brief reversal of current, the McCulloch engineers found that they could dissipate the accumulated gases and successfully recharge the battery. The sys tem, says a McCulloch spokesman, is comparable to the way a mother interrupts her infant's feeding with burping to get rid of gas in the baby's stomach.

The first commercial application of this "burping" principle is in a photographic strobe light being marketed under license by Honeywell Inc. No bigger than a cigarette lighter, the attachment can restore the light unit to full power in 15 minutes. Eventually, McCulloch expects the system to find a wide variety of home, industrial and military uses. And McCulloch engineers see no reason why the technique can not be applied to electric cars.

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