‘Refuelable’ Electric Car Battery Developed

A battery that could be quickly refueled, like a car’s gas tank, has joined the race to develop the first practical electric car.

Westwood-based Luz International Ltd., which produces 95% of the world’s solar electricity, said Thursday that the concept could help replace the polluting internal-combustion engine. Luz said it plans to demonstrate its battery--which uses a silvery liquid slurry to produce an electric charge--with a test run from Sacramento to Los Angeles early in 1992.

While experts find the battery intriguing, many see hurdles before it can meet Luz’s expectations.

For one thing, unlike other experimental batteries, the Luz device needs an extensive and costly support system for refueling. No one outside the company has yet studied a working prototype of the battery. And the company has no estimates of the cost of its battery and the infrastructure it would require.

“You really only know when you have a cell that you can test,” said Philip N. Ross, senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a federal research center operated by the University of California.

The Luz battery, Ross said, is an evolutionary--not revolutionary--refinement of a design developed in France in the early 1970s.

Still, Luz announced the technology with high hopes. “The battery is in its final stages of test, and its performance is beyond expectations,” said Yehuda Harats, leader of the technical team for Israel-based Luz Electric Fuels, the subsidiary of Luz International that is developing the battery.

The battery creates electricity through the interaction of a syrup-like zinc slurry and the oxygen in ordinary air. Such zinc-air batteries are lighter than traditional lead-acid batteries--a critical factor in extending the range between refuelings.

The Luz system would also save weight, says the company, because its elements wouldn’t be recharged in the vehicle. When a battery ran low, the driver would stop for four to six minutes at a filling station while the old slurry was replaced with freshly charged liquid.

The used slurry would be recharged, probably at off-peak hours, at central facilities that could be built near utility plants.

Luz wants to introduce the battery first to commercial delivery fleets in the Los Angeles area. As the filling-station system expanded, private automobiles could use the technology too, the company believes.

The privately held company hopes to introduce the first filling station in Los Angeles in 1993 or 1994.

“The concept of refueling the battery is a rather elegant one in technology,” said Alan C. Lloyd, chief scientist for South Coast Air Quality Management District. Still, he said, the district “would have to look at everything closely” before lending the battery its support.

The Luz battery is a new wrinkle on an estimated 30 to 40 battery technologies under development around the world. Research has stepped up sharply with the approach of California’s requirement that auto firms begin selling “zero-pollution” cars in 1998.

The biggest effort began earlier this year with the formation of the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium, a joint project of the Big Three U.S. auto firms, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Electric Power Research Institute and others.

Luz approached Southern California Edison about joining the project a year ago, said Joe Reeves, a research manager at the utility. But Edison was already committed to another zinc-air battery that it has since developed with Dreisbach ElectroMotive Inc. (DEMI) of Santa Barbara.

“The zinc-air battery has been around, but the (slurry) concept they have is new,” Reeves said.

The DEMI battery can be recharged from existing electrical outlets in a vehicle owner’s garage, eliminating a traditional problem with zinc-air batteries, Reeves said. By contrast, the Luz system would require major expenditures to build central recharging facilities and filling stations and to truck the slurry between them.

However, the Luz technology would make it possible to refuel within minutes, as opposed to an overnight recharging for other electric car batteries. That would better approximate the convenience of gasoline filling stations.

Luz says its battery could power a car up to 300 miles on one charge--about twice the potential of most other battery technologies, according to a spokesman for the battery consortium. However, the Edison-DEMI battery powered a Plymouth Voyager minivan 223 miles on a single charge this year.

Government backers of alternate fuels expressed cautious support.

If the Luz system looks promising, “I’m sure we would work up some kind of support, some public monies for a trial, and perhaps find a fleet user like Edison or the Department of Water & Power,” Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude said.

Braude sponsored the L.A. Initiative, a contest to build an electric vehicle designed from the bottom up--not just adapted from a gasoline model. The winning design used conventional batteries, but Braude said it could as easily run on the Luz technology.

Michael Parrish reported from Los Angeles and Donald Woutat from Detroit.