In December, lead-acid battery separator firm Microporous appointed John Reeves as its new CEO. He talks to BEST about developing a strategy that will accelerate the company into becoming the industry’s number one innovator.
John Reeves is not our average battery man. Sure, he has a bachelor of science degree, but for the past 33 years he has led business growth in industries as diverse as filtration and building materials— often charged with changing their fortunes by providing ‘strategic and tactical leadership to turn around major performance and financial challenges’.
However, Reeves is quick to point out his CV doesn’t signal he is stepping into a company that’s sick; in fact during the interview it becomes quite clear the opposite is true, Microporous is driving growth in the lead battery market. Speaking in a deep, Southern drawl he tells BEST the company is a really stable, sustaining growth-type business and the notion is not how to fix it, but how to add to its strong base.
“It’s more about execution. We’ve got a really good team how do we accelerate growth? It’s not about how we get the wheels back on. I foresee Microporous as a really fun assignment with world-class people,” he says.
Reeves tells BEST, over a Zoom call, that his goal is to position Microporous as the number one innovator in the industry.
“I think that we are going to be ‘The Little Engine That Could’ and incrementally and dependably take the lead-acid battery industry up the curve. Lead-acid really fits into a lot of markets really well, and I think there’s space for it; there’s still an opportunity for us to be seen as the innovator within lead-acid,” he says.
“When I’m asked where I’d like Microporous to be in the next five to ten years, it’s to be the little guys that have come up with big ideas and helped sustain the lead-acid battery industry. Even though the separator is 2% of the cost of the battery, I want us to be punching above our weight and making a big difference to a small component of that battery.”
Leading technology
Part of Reeves’ remit will be attracting even more talent to the firm to achieve his goal of making the US-based company the number one lead-acid battery separator firm.
“I think the greater thing nowadays is, how do you get younger people to be excited about material science based businesses? You know, we’re not biotech, we’re not high technology and that’s a bigger challenge— less in the leadership team and more in the ranks,” he says.
“So we’re looking at different things we can do to attract the junior level talent from a senior level perspective. We’ve got a great team here and I think that we can easily attract other folks.”
For more than 80 years Microporous has built on its reputation for innovation: a reputation it is continuing to bolster through investment.
The company has been committing a higher level of investment in R&D since the Federal Trade Commission approved its acquisition by Seven Mile Capital Partners in 2013, which made Microporous an independent company again.
However, Reeves says those investments tend to take a bit of time to pan out, and if you look at the past years, it’s clear to see a lot more momentum of new products and innovative products within the firm’s space.
“A lot of it is to execute upon that and continue to develop a healthy pipeline,” Reeves says. “We’ve got a couple of handfuls of nice R&D projects now, and I would say that we’ve got some that are in the idolisation stage, some that we’re still experimenting and working, and a few that we’ve recently launched. So it is a pretty healthy pipeline.”
New to the firm’s portfolio are its CellForce and GlassForce products.
CellForce products are hybrid rubber/polyethylene (PE) battery separators designed for industrial traction and deep discharge cycling and automotive applications in lead-acid batteries. It combines the strength and handling characteristics of PE with the electrochemical advantages and reliability of rubber. This enables the battery assembly process to be more flexible, while enhancing battery cycle life by positively affecting top-of-charge voltages and reducing normal in-service maintenance.
This, says the firm, ensures efficient charge and discharge cycles, increases battery life, reduces the effect of antimony poisoning, reduces water loss, requires less power for recharge and ensures less grid corrosion.
Its GlasssForce AGM product is a high purity glass microfiber separator engineered to address the growing demand for AGM and VRLA batteries in automotive and stationary markets. It can be customised for thickness and grammage and is designed to enhance charge and discharge performance, cycle life and has excellent compression integrity.
The GlassForce polypropylene (PP) series of pasting papers is engineered with typical surface area values ranging from 1.8-2.2m2/g. It serves as a processing aid in the lead pasting process, preventing plates from sticking together by holding the wet paste to the grid to allow for high speed pasting of thin-plate-pure-lead plates.
The separators are made from different materials— such natural rubber, silica, PE/rubber hybrids, ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE), and glass microfibre— to suit different applications and to serve different functions.
Silica is a pore-former in both PE and rubber separators. Rubber suppresses antimony and can inhibit oxidation. PE/rubber hybrids can be designed to optimise different properties such as antimony suppression, electrical resistance and oxidation resistance.
Microporous also has solutions for stationary applications and motive (12V AGM/flooded) batteries.
The first solution emphasises longer life, so the back webs are thicker. They sometimes use other materials, such as rubber (antimony suppression/oxidation resistance), and phenolics (oxidation resistance).
Fundamentally, an automotive battery separator is a balancing act between as low an electrical resistance as possible, coupled with oxidation resistance in a very cost-conscious environment. Therefore, they tend to be PE separators with thin back webs (150-250 microns) for standard flooded with formulation (material ratios, oil levels), optimised for maximum possible oxidation resistance.
The company is also researching how separators can aid dynamic-charge-acceptance (DCA)— which is a big issue particularly with start-stop systems— and an antimony suppressant, as a way to extend the life of batteries.
The firm has a couple of customers that are conducting initial testing and have been very receptive of the CellForce ULR for start-stop batteries, says Reeves.
“We’ve got a couple of game-changing technologies I really can’t talk about right now, but we’re excited they will somewhat redefine where lead-acid batteries can play as far as receptivity of charge,” he adds.
“We still need to continue investment there, as you will understand. Just doing full life-cycle testing on batteries is time-consuming and difficult to do, and we’re very dependent on our partners.”
Partnering the industry
When it comes to commercialising a product, the company understands better than most the importance of working with industry partners.
The firm has prototyping capability and physical testing capability and the ability to assimilate what would happen in a battery, but it remains dependent on customers— or potential customers— to build batteries and help them conduct final validation testing.
One of the things Microporous has done is leverage universities, such as the University of Tennessee and Knoxville, which has made available scanning electron microscopy (SEM) testing equipment that would be difficult for a company the size of Microporous to afford.
To this end, David Mihara, the firm’s VP of technology, has brought on board a PhD from academia who has relationships with different universities that have helped the company to extend its R&D capabilities by leveraging colleges within a couple hundred miles of its R&D laboratories in Piney Flats, Tennessee.
The company also has in-house validation testing and several potential customers that are conducting validation testing on its CellForce product.
“If there was only one customer willing to do that I would say the product’s reception had been lukewarm,” says Reeves. “However, a number of folks have shown enthusiasm for those products and are making that investment to test them through their systems.
“I would say that it’s been pretty well received thus far, particularly with the original equipment automotive industry. It’s a bit of a long, protracted test, but we’re down the road with a few different customers so that I would say it’s been well received.
“I mean, it is reiterative, but on that particular product, I think it’s fair to say that we’re pretty comfortable with where the product stands. We’ve done enough pre-testing before we’ve gone to our customers to encourage us to say it’s all right for us to somewhat stake our reputation at our customers. The feedback may cause us to tweak the product a bit, but it would be unlikely for us to have to go back to the drawing board at this stage.”
Game changing
Some may think the lead battery industry is resting on its laurels, but the heritage technology is fighting back against lithium-ion on many fronts.
“For me, as a new guy coming in, as an outsider, I would have said this industry is flat. But to see some of the game-changing work at Microporous shows a lot of creativity,” says Reeves.
“So it’s something that’s very encouraging. We have an R&D roadmap that Brad Reed (VP of corporate development) has been working on for the past year that maps out technologies versus the challenges of the industry. It’s a two-dimensional map metric that shows needs and shortfalls versus technology alternatives.
“That map has helped us to recruit some people in our organisation that have some specific skill sets as well. It has also helped us to prioritise, and we constantly go back and talk to our customer to address issues or identify opportunities to enhance those activities.”
