The battery of your car, that of your mobile phone, that of your smart watch. A battery is an artifact capable of accumulating energy and supplying it, thus allowing certain devices to work. But what types are there? What materials are batteries made of or how long are they capable of lasting? There are some that you should never use and we explain why.
We have batteries in practically all the gadgets that surround us but also in others that you don’t “think” about daily such as military use, medical applications or in your own car that surely has run out of battery at some point due to leaving the lights on. But there are many different types of batteries, and not all of them are recommended.
alkaline batteries
Alkaline batteries can be the batteries you use in children’s toys and all kinds of gadgets, for example. Alkaline batteries with a long useful life and that offer more power than others such as saline batteries, for example. Alkaline batteries or batteries work with the reaction between metallic zinc and manganese dioxide and use potassium hydroxide as an electrolyte compared to the chloride of other batteries such as saline batteries. They are ideal for toys or devices that need more power. In addition, they stand out for a longer duration that means that we do not have to replace them frequently. Within the batteries or alkaline batteries we find all kinds of formats according to their size such as AA, AAA, etc.
Of course, we must bear in mind that alkaline batteries or batteries are harmful to the environment and their recycling in specialized containers is always recommended.
Lead Acid Batteries
Lead-acid batteries are usually those used in car engines, for example. Although also in other vehicles or with other uses. The battery uses an electrolyte that contains a solution of sulfuric acid with distilled water. Each battery, roughly speaking, is made up of cells or pairs of electrodes. Positive electrodes with lead plates. During the charging process, lead sulfate on negative plates is reduced to metal, and on positive plates it is converted to lead oxide. In this process it is possible to generate electrical energy thanks to the exchange of electrons that occurs and lead-acid batteries are affordable and easy to manufacture.
They are not only used in cars and other vehicles, but are also widely used for photovoltaic panels, for example. In addition, we also see them in some alarm or lighting devices.
nickel batteries
They don’t have the best performance but they are cheap and there are several different types of nickel batteries that have emerged over time.
- nickel iron
Fine tubes rolled by sheets of nickel-plated steel. It is inside these tubes where nickel hydroxide is used and iron is used in positive and negative plates respectively. These batteries were originally developed by Thomas Edison more than a hundred years ago and are characterized by having a long life and by withstanding overloads very well, for example. Although at present they are no longer used due to their high production cost and their obsolescence. In the vast majority of cases they have been replaced by other types of batteries.
- nickel cadmium
The nickel-cadmium battery is another type of battery in disuse due to the memory effect and its contamination. They consist of a cadmium anode and a nickel hydroxide cathode as well as potassium hydroxide as an electrolyte. Their advantage is that they are batteries that can be recharged but have drawbacks: the memory effect, low energy density and a highly polluting material (cadmium). These are rechargeable batteries or batteries designed for domestic use but have been discarded and replaced by nickel-metal hydride batteries.
- nickel hydride
Nickel-hydride or nickel-metal hydride batteries or cells are also, like the previous ones, rechargeable batteries. They arrive as substitutes for cadmium, thus managing to “save” the environment and also lowering costs. The cathode used is a metal hydride alloy. In addition, they also have other advantages compared to the previous ones: they reduce the memory effect and have a greater load capacity. In addition, they are perfectly rechargeable and have all kinds of uses. For example, NiMH batteries are used in all kinds of hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius, for example, as well as in consumer electronics.
lithium batteries
Lithium batteries are the most used today, the ones we see the most on a day-to-day basis and the ones that offer the highest performance. Lithium batteries are in most of the devices that we use in our daily lives, such as mobile phones, for example, thanks to the fact that they have advantages such as good performance or low weight, as well as a minimum memory effect, for example.
- lithium ion
Accumulators or lithium ion batteries that are usually the most frequent in electronics, in day-to-day devices such as mobile phones. They are very light and small, offer good performance, have a high energy density and hardly any memory effect. But they also have drawbacks such as a not too long useful life (approximately three years) and they do not last long (no more than one day). Another of the main drawbacks is that they can overheat. Although they are safe and are the most widely used today, they tend to degrade over time and progressively over the years.
- lithium polymer
A variation of the above are lithium polymer or LiPo batteries that offer us a higher energy density. The main difference is that they opt for a polymer that is not liquid, but in this case it is semi-solid. The applications are similar to the previous ones and can be used for vehicles, mobile phones, external batteries, computers, multimedia players…
They have a main problem and that is that they cannot be fully discharged because they are useless if the charge drops below 30%. They are similar to the previous ones in terms of safety “problems” because we must also avoid overloads or excessive heating.
