A maintenance engineer´s perspective on battery performance relative to network reliability

This paper is intended to share the experience of an American operating telephone company relative to storage battery and battery plant performance. While, overall, battery performance is fairly good, some engineers still consider lead acid batteries an emerging technology. As dependant as the telephone network is on batteries, there are numerous problems which must be overcome and many specific incidents which might have been avoided. A number of these are presented in the paper as case studies. Included are the specific problems and preventive possibilities. The problems discussed are: battery explosions, valve regulated battery problems, and thermal runaway