Batteries and Their Importance

1060 Words3 Pages

Batteries and Their Importance We use batteries everyday, we use them to

start our cars and to listen to our Walkmans. I have a few questions:

How do batteries work? What are the different kinds of batteries

Batteries and Their Importance

We use batteries everyday, we use them to start our cars and

to listen to our Walkmans. I have a few questions: How do batteries

work? What are the different kinds of batteries? Why do they die? Why

do they lose energy when they are not used for a long time? Well I

tried my best to find the best answers for these questions and a

little more.

Battery, also called an electric cell, is a device that

converts chemical energy into electricity. All batteries contain an

electrolyte, a positive electrode, and a negative electrode. There are

two general types of batteries. Batteries in which chemicals cannot be

reconstituted into their original form once their energy have been

converted these are called primary cells. Batteries in which the

chemicals can be reconstituted by passing an electric current through

them in the opposite direction are known as secondary cells, are

rechargeable cells.

The primary battery is the most common type of battery used

today, invented by the French chemist Geoges Leclanche in the late

1860’s. At the time this invention was very important and helped the

start of the industrial revolution. It allowed people with portable

electricity. This popular invention was called the dry cell or

flashlight battery. The Lechlanche cell is very similar to the dry

cell we use today. The positive pole is a rode of carbon embedded in a

black manganese dioxide (MnO2) and Carbon particles and the negative

electrode is made of zinc. The electrolyte consists of a mixture of

ammonium chloride and zinc chloride made into a paste. This sits in

between the negative and positive electrodes, which acts as an ionic

conductor. When the cell is in use, atoms of the Zinc in the outer

case are oxidized, giving up electrons and forming zinc ions.

Zn - 2e ® Zn++

The electrons are lost by the zinc atoms then flow through the load

(the device being powered) and supply energy. They re-enter the cell

at the carbon rode that serves as the positive electrode. As this

series of events happen, the battery begins to lose pure zinc atoms,

and the battery starts to die. This type of cell gives abo...

... middle of paper ...

...e 1900’s. It works

similar to the lead-acid battery, but it is much smaller. A

disadvantage is that the battery loses a little bit of capacity each

time it is charged.

In recent years a number of new types of batteries have been

designed for use in electric vehicles and other applications. In

improving various conventional storage batteries, they have been able

to make electric cars and longer lasting batteries. Still there exits

some draw backs to these batteries, either short range, high expense,

bulkiness, or environmental problems. The U.S Advanced Battery

Consortion (USADC) was set up in 1991 to speed up development of new

storage batteries. Batteries are being developed that cause no

environmental hazards and occupy little space. All this advancement in

batteries is wonderful, but we need to see the importance batteries

play in the world today. The world is dependent on the battery, from

the use in cars to calculators. The battery is one of the few sources

of energy that is universal, a Japanese calculator can still work with

batteries found in the U.S no electric conversion is needed. This is

reason why the battery is so needed and important to the world.

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