Lithium batteries — the new hope

The cost of maintenance can quickly outweigh installation costs when it comes to emergency lighting. Now, new advances in battery technology are changing that.

Emergency lighting and exit signage are essential to ensure safe egress by building occupants when the normal lighting fails, including during a fire or other crisis. The right product selection has a significant effect on both the compliance outcome and the overall cost of ownership for the end user. Once installed, the cost of maintaining the emergency lighting system to ensure compliance has been a significant issue. In many cases, the maintenance cost exceeds the cost of installation when using old technology batteries including nickel-cadmium (NiCd), nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) and sealed lead acid (SLA). In short, the real costs begin after installation.

With recent advancements in lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery technology, combined with some clever engineering design, the issues around high maintenance costs can be a thing of the past for building owners and facilities managers. It is important to note that different LFP batteries will produce large variations in maintenance cost savings; therefore, it is very important to ask manufacturers for actual site results before making a selection based on your requirements. As an example, Clevertronics has two ranges fitted with LFP products. The Lithium Premium (LP) range produces around 50% maintenance savings range compared to NiCd products, while the L10 Optimum range, fitted with Lithium Nanophosphate technology batteries, is able to produce an unmatched 85% in maintenance savings.

Other benefits that can be achieved with select LFP products include energy savings of up to 80% and the important fact that lithium is a much safer option for humans and the environment due to the absence of dangerous toxic substances of cadmium, nickel and lead, which will be covered later in the article.

To review the performance difference select LFP products can have over old technology batteries, a case study at Etihad Stadium was undertaken. Over three years ago, the Clevertronics L10 product range with Lithium Nanophosphate battery technology was installed on-site and is well on track to deliver an incredible saving of over $1 million during the seven-year maintenance period.

Etihad Stadium is a 52,000-seat multipurpose facility designed to cater for major sporting and entertainment events, as well as social, business and private functions. The venue hosts as many as 80 arena sports and entertainment events and 600 non-event day functions annually in its 15 different function spaces. Since opening on 9 March 2000, well over 32 million people have passed through the venue’s turnstiles.

The stadium now hosts in the vicinity of 50 AFL matches a season, as well as A-League games and Big Bash League cricket matches. The venue also regularly stages international sporting events such as Rugby League World Cup matches, Rugby Union test matches and soccer World Cup qualifiers.

In 2012, Honeywell was tasked with a review of the emergency lighting within Etihad Stadium as the maintenance and energy costs continued to climb. The existing fittings were nearing end of life, which had created the need for a major components replacement. With 2756 exit and emergency lights installed within the facility and a high volume of foot traffic, quality and performance of emergency lighting and escape signage is critical, so a decision was made to refurbish the entire stadium.

Honeywell Victoria TAM Operations Manager Matthew Parisi was involved in reviewing the options available to ensure the stadium met the standards required and also provided the best total cost solution for his customer.

After considering the options, Parisi selected an LFP product from Clevertronics and was amazed at the performance this product could achieve over previous alternatives.

“The L10 lithium range is the way of the future,” said Parisi.

“I believe the move away from NiCd batteries will be quite swift as building owners and facility managers become aware of the numerous advantages that lithium batteries offer. The added advantage of low environmental impact and also less waste through longer replacement intervals also makes it a far more sustainable technology compared to existing practice. Having no memory effect and being smaller in physical size are also advantageous qualities that attracted us to the product.

“During the installation period, Clevertronics also provided outstanding technical support to assist with the installation, ensuring a swift and uncomplicated installation of the L10 product. We estimate that the total energy and maintenance costs will drop from $1,083,830 to $178,867 over a seven-year period, which is an 83.5% saving. The switch will also ensure an energy saving of approximately 70%, equating to a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 932 tonnes over the same seven-year period, which is quite remarkable,” he said.

The project was a 12-month staged upgrade, completed in August 2013, which involved installing 2756 exit and emergency lights integrated into a Zoneworks computer monitoring system. The Zoneworks monitoring system allows for automatic compliance testing of the system, real-time luminaire reporting and access to testing and reporting over the internet.

Interestingly, the product selected by Honeywell was also the world’s first LFP-powered emergency light designed and manufactured by Australian-based company Clevertronics. The development of the Clevertronics L10 range was no small feat and took over three years of research, development and testing by a team of Australian-based engineers. The L10 range installed throughout the stadium has a maintenance-free design life of 10 years, which is approximately double that of emergency lighting products powered by NiCd or NiMH batteries.

Recent results from the site in late 2015 have shown that the L10 batteries still have 95% capacity after three years in service, which indicates that the batteries are well on track to outlast the 100,000-hour LEDs. The site is well on track to deliver the 83.5% reduction in maintenance and energy costs estimated at the time of installation.

To understand the challenges of incorporating an LFP battery into an emergency light, and why long-term testing and making it work in harmony with the total product is vital to ensuring long-term reliability, Michael Duce, national systems and engineering manager from Clevertronics, provided some insight.

“When we were embarking on this project, we knew the reliability of the product was centered around the impact heat would have on the components inside the emergency luminaires, so we put significant resources into redesigning products to place batteries away from heat sources. In the case of batten luminaires, we developed a thermally isolated section or POD at the end of the batten to house the LFP battery and the emergency LED light source,” said Duce.

Testing was rigorous and Duce and his Australian-based team spent over two years testing the product before it was released on the market.

“The second challenge was to ensure we could incorporate the battery into the various range of fittings. Our customers needed a complete range of emergency, exit and batten fittings for their projects, and to realise the 80% plus maintenance savings from the L10 range we needed to deliver the entire range as a package. This was challenging from an engineering perspective due to the massive scale of the development task, given the large number of different products in our range.

“It meant that we had to structure the development team to work on several product families concurrently and work very closely with the production team to ensure a smooth transition to full-scale production. To see the results now, after having them on-site for close to four years, provides great satisfaction, especially being the global innovators,” he said.

What impact are the nickel-cadmium, nickel-metal hydride and lead alternatives having on the environment?

One of the other benefits of moving to the LFP battery technology is a significant concern around the toxic and harmful substances found in NiCd, NiMH and SLA batteries. These toxic substances can cause harm to humans and the environment if not disposed of and recycled correctly. There is concern that the expected increase in LFP battery-powered products coming into the market will result in an increase of old batteries finding their way to landfill.

The harmful substances in questions come in the form of the following three battery types:

1. Nickel-cadmium (NiCd)
2. Nickel-metal hydride (Ni-MH)
3. Sealed lead acid (SLA)

These three substances are known to have a harmful impact on both human and the environment — so much so that the National Pollutant Inventory produced by the federal government lists cadmium, lead and nickel among it 93 priority hazardous substances.

Also, the recycling rate of these batteries is understood to be less than 5%, which is of major concern, given the amount of these substances entering landfill.

With an estimated five million NiCd batteries ending up in landfill each year, the Queensland Government and the Lighting Council Australia have partnered in a program called EXITCYCLE, which is aimed at increasing the recycling rate of emergency and exit lighting batteries and preventing toxic metals ending up in landfill. The dumping of batteries equates to approximately 90 tonnes of cadmium entering our environment annually, which urgently needs to be addressed.

The Department of Environment and Heritage Protection and Lighting Council Australia are encouraging corporate organisations, shopping centres and councils to sign up to EXITCYCLE to show their commitment to recycle their emergency lighting batteries.

Queensland Minister for Environment and Heritage Protection Dr Steven Miles says the EXITCYCLE battery recycling initiative will begin with a 12-month pilot in Queensland.

“We’re encouraging voluntary recycling action from big business and corporate groups to prevent emergency and exit light batteries from ending up in landfill,” he said.

“The pilot will provide valuable information to feed into the development of a national rechargeable battery product stewardship scheme. We are proud to support Lighting Council Australia and encourage the use of environmentally appropriate solutions to managing our wastes.”

The pilot is an initiative of Lighting Council Australia, with funding provided by the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection.The EXITCYCLE program is a great initiative and will play a significant part in reducing the impact of these hazardous substances making it into our landfill and our environment.

The good news is that the remaining and growing 25–30% of the market is powered by an alternative battery — lithium iron phosphate (LFP). 

From an environmental and health perspective, LFP contains no toxic heavy metals and no carcinogens. A variant of LFP batteries using a patented ‘Nanophosphate’ for the cathode material achieves at least twice the calendar life of the existing battery technologies and, because it features a much higher energy density, is less than half the size and weight. These LFP batteries have a much lower self-discharge rate, and that translates to lower power charging circuitry than ever before possible.

Image credit:© aradaphotography/Dollar Photo Club

The environmental impact of LFP battery technology is tiny compared with the damage caused by any of the three current technologies, as shown in the following table:

	SLA	NiCd	NiMH	LiFePO4/LFP
Contains heavy metals or carcinogens	Yes (lead)	Yes (nickel and cadmium)	Yes (nickel)	No
RoHS compliant	No (exempt)	No (exempt)	Yes	Yes
ATSDR rating	#2 (lead)	#7 (cadmium) #57 (nickel)	#57 (nickel)	#334 (lithium)
Carcinogen free	No (lead)	No (nickel and cadmium)	No (nickle)	Yes
Recyclable	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Recycle cost to user	Equal	Equal	Equal	Equal