The variety and scope of primary and secondary battery applications in domestic goods and capital equipment for civilian and military uses has steadily grown over the years. Annual global sales of the battery business are exceeding GBP4000 million, encouraging a number of books on individual battery systems. This book is intended to bring together the key features of five electrochemical power sources. Outlining the historical background and basic principles of the direct conversion of electrochemical energy into DC electricity, this book also gives salient details of the manufacturing processes, performances under different conditions of operations and the services for which the batteries are mainly used. This books aims to provide information to graduate electrochemists, engineers working in universities and technical colleges, in Government and other technological institutions, and particularly those engaged in the development of portable power sources and in the design and use of equipment using these devices.

Author Biography

Born in New Zealand, Monty Barak was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1926 and worked under Sir Harold Hartley at Oxford. He received a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in 1929 and worked with Sir Hugh Taylor at Princeton University, USA. An assistant lecturer at Kings College, London, he later joined the Chloride Electrical Storage Company (now the Chloride Group), where he was chief chemist of the main storage battery factory, director of the research and development laboratories and finally scientific adviser. Dr Barak served on the committees of the Council of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, the Science Museum Advisory Council, as a founder member and first chairman of the UK Society for Electrochemistry (now the Electrochemistry Group of the Chemical Society), and was awarded the Frank Booth medal in 1970 from theInternational Power Sources Symposium Committee. He has filed a number of patents and contributed manyreviews and articles on storage batteries, fuel cells andrelated power sources.