Lead Acid Battery Manufacturing: Planté to ABB Robots

Lead acid battery manufacturing is a heavy, dusty and surprisingly manual business. The battery under a car bonnet is built from pasted lead plates, and each plate has to be cast, coated, dried and stacked before a cell can be assembled. This post follows the battery from Gaston Planté's first rechargeable cell of 1859 to modern plate lines, looks at the October 2026 news about a re-engineered lead acid design, and asks where ABB robots could help with the lifting, stacking and packing that still burden workers.

A 12 volt, 66 amp hour lead acid car battery, the product that plate lines feed. Photo: RG72 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From Planté's rolled lead sheets to pasted plates

Gaston Planté built the first rechargeable battery in 1859. His cell used two lead sheets separated by rubber strips, rolled into a spiral and immersed in dilute sulfuric acid, and it produced about 2 volts. It was the first battery that could be recharged, and the lead sheets did the whole job: they were both the supports and the active material. That design was simple, but it was a hand built object, made one cell at a time, and it was not yet something a factory could turn out by the thousand.

Gaston Planté's lead acid cell of 1859, a coil of lead sheets in acid. Photo: unknown / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1881 Camille Alphonse Faure improved the design by pressing a paste of lead oxide into a lead grid, which formed a plate. This was easier to mass produce, and it is still the basic idea of the plates in a car battery today. Factories needed ways to cast grids, mix and apply paste, dry the plates and stack them into groups. Grid casting is described as semi automatic, while expansion, continuous casting and punching tools can make grids fully automatically.

A complete cell with its positive and negative grid plates, from a 1903 electrical handbook. Photo: Rankin Kennedy via Andy Dingley / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The car gave the battery its biggest market. Charles Kettering's electric starter was introduced on the 1912 Cadillac and ran on a lead acid battery, which made the battery a standard part of the car. Plants grew with demand, and the pasting, drying and stacking steps became the backbone of every battery factory. Plate lines used belt or drum pasting machines, a drying tunnel and a suction stacker that lifts plates, separates them and builds packages for pallets. Workers handled the stacks and pallets between those machines.

A 1912 Cadillac, the year the model got its electric starter. Photo: Greg Gjerdingen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

What the October 2026 news and today's plate lines show

In mid October 2026, ArcActive switched on a re-engineered lead acid battery pilot at Deakin University's Waurn Ponds campus in Geelong, with support from Origin Energy. The company replaced the conventional internal structure with a fabric framework that holds the energy storing material, which it says should lengthen cycle life at low cost. Its chief executive, Stuart McKenzie, argues that engineers, approvers and insurers already understand lead acid, which should make approval and insurance easier than for a new chemistry. The design builds on lead acid technology already used in telecoms, hospitals and data centres. The cycle life and cost claims are the company's own, and no independent data was found.

The inside of a lead acid battery, with its plates and separators laid out. Photo: Lukas A. / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The plate line is where automation matters most. In May 2026, Rosendahl Nextrom's BM brand described a modular automation concept for handling pasted plates, and it called manual or semi automated stack loading a bottleneck, with heavy lifting and lead dust exposure for workers. An older case from BBI Battery in Naperville, Illinois, shows the idea in practice. A Kawasaki ZX300S robot lifts and aligns 300 pounds of battery plates up to 1,000 times a day, and the plant reported a 200 percent production increase with less manpower.

A lead plate with its lug, taken from a worn 12 volt battery. Photo: Sakar.solanki / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB did not supply that robot, and we found no ABB project in lead acid plate handling. Its battery stories cover other jobs, including robots at Scania's battery assembly plant in Sweden. ABB's IRB 6700 belongs to the 150 to 300 kg class of heavy handling robots, so it could lift whole plate stacks, and its IRB 460 palletizer and IRB 360 FlexPicker are standard in packing lines. Using them in a lead acid plant is a possibility. Programs for such a cell are first built in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Where lead acid plants and robots are heading

Demand for lead acid has not gone away, which is the point of ArcActive's pilot. Those are the markets lead acid already serves, and the company is aiming at commercial and industrial storage where approval and insurance can slow projects. The pilot sits in the campus microgrid, so the battery is being tested in the job it was designed for. If those uses grow, plants will want more consistent plates and fewer injuries from lifting. Newer battery types are covered in our posts on EV battery assembly and on battery cell formation, which also starts with Planté's plates.

An ABB robot working over battery modules in the cell at ABB's Baden plant. Photo: ABB

A plant could take this in steps. The first candidates are the least pleasant jobs, such as stacking plates and packing finished batteries, since they expose people to lead dust and heavy loads. Casting and pasting already run on dedicated machines. A patent notes that gravity cast grids can jam when fed into a pasting machine at high speed, causing stoppages and scrap, so a robot that handles grids gently has to cope with that. Feeding a pasting machine from a robot would be a harder job than stacking.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a large panel at dhp technology, a heavy load of the kind plate stacks represent. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, safety and skills. A plant must earn back a robot through fewer injuries and higher output, as the BBI case claims. The first test is whether the numbers hold. Safety matters because workers still load materials near the machines, and ABB's SafeMove software is one way to limit robot speed and zones around people. Skills are the third problem: someone has to program and maintain the cell in a plant where many of these jobs were done by hand for generations.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

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