Top-Battery

Mobile Computing users (people that use laptops, PDAs, and Smartphones) have one thing in common and that is they all use batteries to power their device. When considering a battery purchase most mobile computing users seek to find the answer to one of the following questions if not all (questions of which relate to the battery); the questions are: What does the life of the battery mean? How is battery life measured? What factors determine battery life? When does the battery begin to lose life? What factors shorten battery life? Is it better to buy a long life battery? In this article series I will look at the meaning of battery life; how battery life is measured; what factors determine battery life; when do batteries begin to lose life; factors that shorten the battery life; whether it is better to buy a long life battery or a lesser capacity battery; how individual usage and internal technical factors affect battery life. What does the life of the battery mean? Battery life is th...

Have you ever wondered “why” your battery stops working? All batteries fail at one point or another and more importantly all batteries fail – due to different reasons. Specifically, two identical batteries that come from the same manufacturing batch, with the same identical voltage, capacity, and chemistry fail (or stop working) at different times. Why? To understand why batteries fail I will walk through the steps of a battery mode and effects analysis to discover modes of battery failure and the effects of the battery failure. A battery mode and effects analysis is a procedure for identifying and understanding potential failure modes in a battery system. A battery mode and effects analysis contains four main steps or phases: Battery Mode Pre-work Battery Failure Severity Battery Failure Occurrence Battery Failure Detection Battery Mode Pre-work The Battery Mode Pre-work is an essential preliminary component to a battery mode and effects analysis and often ...

Have you ever held a battery before? Did you know that a battery though relatively safe can act and operate like a mini bomb? Don't worry your next battery more than likely will not explode on you if handled correctly. In fact in excess of 100 million battery related devices have been bought by consumer since 2003 (that is a conservative number). However if you ever use a battery or plan on using a battery you should know how to handle and maintain basic battery safety guidelines.  In fact as a general rule of thumb battery packs have to be: Batteries have to be stored safely Batteries have to be charged correctly Batteries have to be protected from unexpected damage Batteries have to be handled safely Batteries have to be stored safely Batteries can be stored both indoors and outdoors as long as batteries are kept in cool conditions without direct sun light on the battery or battery storage box or container. Batteries should be stored in a dry location with low hum...

Have you ever wished that you had an extra 20 minutes of battery life left in your portable device? How about an hour! A real difference exists between the life of your battery and the displayed battery charge meter on your device? How big of a difference? How often does it occur? Why does it occur? What can be done? In this article we will look at these questions and learn about what you can do to reduce power waste and maximize your battery life. Help my batteries dead and I can't power on!  The cultural expression of a "dead battery" is the habitual practice that occurs in place of the more technically appropriate reason of declining capacity. Declining capacity is when the amount of charge a battery can hold gradually decreases due to usage, aging, and with some chemistry, lack of maintenance. Declining capacity is inherent in the ultimate design of a battery – due to limitations with technology -  you could consider it the natural side effect or wear and tear of the...

Y our laptop battery is more than likely a Li-ion battery and if it is then there is a natural tendency to keep your laptop plugged into a wall outlet when you are close to one. You may also find that you are actually "plugged" in to a wall outlet more than you are not and there in lies a problem. When your laptop is plugged into a wall outlet your battery heats up big time and heat and lithium do not mix well together. Hold on! You have to charge battery. Yes that is true, but you do not have to keep your laptop plugged into a wall outlet for the entire school year! But won't that reduce my battery life if I'm constantly powered from the battery? Your battery will diminish in capacity – the ability to charge and power your laptop. That is a fact and a natural consequence of batteries today. This diminishing power performance is called battery degradation and power loss. On a high level a battery over time degrades and eventually stops working, this is no surprise, ...

Today more and more people are using consumer electronic devices containing lithium batteries. The probability of you being one of them is very high.You could have a laptop, Tablets pc, cell-phone or even a other consumer electronic equipment, all of which more likely than not has a lithium ion or a lithium polymer chemical based battery system. If so then one question that you will have eventually is how many times will I be able to charge the battery before it is effectively dead? Is it 300 times, 400 times, or 500 times? The answer is between 300-500 times. But what does that answer mean? We will take you know something that charging cycle and involves the replenishment of electrons. In order to get a beginning understanding of what actually is taking place during a charge and discharge cycle we need to understand: what a battery is, how it works, what it produces, and finally what happens when you charge and discharge. What is a Battery? A battery is a device that converts chemi...

A charge-discharge cycle involves draining or using your battery to where there is for all intensive purposes, no charge left, and then subsequently charging the battery with a power adapter to 100% capacity. This process of charging and discharging (charge cycling) can only be done between 300-500 times. The question that we want to address is why? Why is it that lithium batteries can only be charged less than 500 times? Why does a battery over time degrade and eventually stops working and what if any does the reduction of the battery's active material and subsequent causes of chemical changes effect battery degredation? Battery Degradation and Power Loss A battery over time degrades and eventually stops working, this is no surprise, but why this occurs is really a fascinating yet technical process. These reasons are complex issues that are way beyond user control and are wholly contained within your battery and within your device! These technical processes are a result of the r...

What is involved when a battery is manufactured? What materials are needed to manufacture a battery? What are battery cell grades? What do battery grades mean? How do the different grades affect the quality of a battery? How can you know what battery grade you have? And is any one grade more important then another? To understand battery cell grades we have to understand how batteries are manufactured. Battery manufacturing involves the collection of raw material, the development and setting of design specifications, and the assembly of an individual battery pack. On a very high level that is ultimately what is involved when a battery is made.  Furthermore battery manufacturers utilize manufacturing principles, much like manufacturers of other products, to get the batteries made efficiently and effectively. When it comes to the collection of raw materials manufacturers have to collect very specific material to be used in the assembly of battery packs. This material includes the follow...

When you peer into the world of batteries your first thought is "wow – there sure are a lot of batteries". While this is certainly true as self directed environmentalist I wonder just how many batteries can actually be recycled. To answer the question let's look at batteries from the manufacturing floor on up to the end user. The battery business just as in any business requires that materials are bought, assembled into products, and eventually sold to an end user. Batteries however have an interesting collection of materials, which are designed to collect energy, store energy, and redistribute energy on demand. These processes on the surface seem very environmentally friendly but let's see just how friendly! As alluded to above building a battery requires basic components including: the casing, the chemistry, the electrolyte, and the battery's specialized hardware The Battery Casing The purpose of a battery casing is for enclosing and hermetically sealing an ...

Most rechargeable batteries have a charge-discharge cycle that ranges between 300-500 cycles (for lithium based chemistries – NIMH can have up to 800 charge-discharge cycles and NICD chemistries can have up to 1200). A charge-discharge cycle means that a battery once at 100% draws power down to 0%. Then after recharge it will be back at 100%. This can be done 300-500 times on the same lithium based battery. Now most battery users recharge their batteries before the battery reaches 0%, this is perfectly acceptable, but still the same principles of the charge-discharge cycle limitations are in effect. One common mistake is to assume that a battery that has a 1 year warranty will last for 365 days and when it does not last 1 year the assumption is is that the battery must be bad. This is a fallacy and an erroneous belief – in essence incorrect! Here is why! The battery is a device that converts chemical energy into electrical energy. Batteries have two electrodes, an anode (the negativ...

To build a battery you have four basic overarching battery components including the casing, chemistry, electrolyte, and the internal specialized hardware. At the core of these four basic overarching battery components are the foundation blocks; the raw materials necessary for the construction of a battery. Minerals and materials used in the construction of batteries are numerous but the core mineral required to have a battery is the batteries chemical which can either be : cadmium, cobalt, lead, lithium, and nickel (along with other rare earth elements).  Why is the chemical one of the most important element in a battery: because a battery at its most basic element is a system that converts and stores electrochemical energy for the purpose of providing portable power to a device. Without the chemistry changing chemical energy into electrical energy is impossible. So needless to say the availability of minerals used in batteries are highly important! What's Inside A Battery? A typ...

If you ever were curious to know just how much of the chemical, lithium, was packed into your battery then there is a way you can calculate it. Let's look at an example, say the HP Compaq 367759-001 , we know that this battery has the following technical specifications: 10.8V, 8800 mAh, Li-ion. So now let's determine the ELC for one of the cells in this battery. As stated above the rated capacity is 8800 mAh. The mAh is the milliamps and so if we convert that to Ah or amp hours in order to do our calculation you get 8.8 Ah (8800 mAh is the same as 8.8 Ah). Secondly, we need to divide the voltage by of the battery by the known voltage of each cell used in the battery. Most batteries use either a 3.6V or a 3.7V cell. In the HP Compaq 367759-001 battery cells have a 3.6V. Finally we can complete our effort in knowing the total ELC in the 367759-001 by performing the following… 1. Divide the stated volts (V) on battery pack by 3.6 (or 3.7) and round to the nearest whole number...

Lithium-oxygen, or lithium-air batteries are one of many pathways to improving on today's energy storage technologies. Lithium, and other metal-air batteries are favored in research for their potential for high energy densities, however low efficiency and poor cycle life have proved tough obstacles to overcome in developing the technology. One way to boost the performance is using a catalyst to speed up reactions at the electrodes. However, finding a material that can speed both the charge and discharge mechanisms presents a further challenge, and many of the working catalysts reported to date rely on prohibitively expensive materials including platinum and gold. "…designing a highly active catalyst that can minimize the energy barriers—excess input energy—to form and decompose Li2O2 nanoparticles at the cathode is a key challenge for the development of this technology," state scientists led by the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in a recently published paper. An...

Smart Battery packs have very specialized hardware that make possible a battery to provide just the right power at just the right moment. This hardware includes the connector, the fuse, the charge and discharge FETs,  the cell pack, the sense resistor (RSENSE), the primary and secondary protection ICs,  the fuel-gauge IC, the thermistor,  the pc board, and the EEPROM or firmware for the fuel-gauge IC. One of the most critical component in this list is the cell pack.  The battery cell pack can be thought of as the holding area of the battery's chemical. The battery cell pack is critical to the overall capability of the smart battery. Cell packs have to be designed and integrated based upon the vitals of the battery including chemistry type (Li-ion, Li-po, NICD, NIMH, etc.) cycle life, storage-capacity loss, shelf life, impedance, capacity at different rates of discharge and temperature, and mechanical and environmental requirements. It is critical to say the least. But how do you ma...

There are three types of battery chemistries currently in use with power tools. They are NiCD, NiMH, and Li-Ion chemistries. The decision to choose one of the specific battery chemistry for your power tool depends on your application, the frequency of use, and the amount of power you need. Here is a brief breadown of the top benefits of each type: Benefits NiCd NiMH Li-ion Life Span Avg 5-10 years Avg 3-5 years Avg 1-3 years Weight Heavy Medium Light Capacity – The higher the capacity rating, the longer your battery can last between charges (this is runtime). Average runtime per charge Highest -longest lasting runtime per charge Good runtime per charge Power per Charge Average Excellent Good Charge Time Depends on Capacity Depends on Capacity Depends on Capacity ...