Battery Capacity Fade and the Importance of Using Quality Load Testers

Why does a battery age? How do I deal with capacity fade? These are common questions that device manufacturers often ask when developing their products.

When a battery is designed, the fading process starts immediately and continues until it is written off.

Keep reading to understand more about battery capacity fade and the importance of battery load testing.

 

How Does a Battery Fade or Age?

A battery is a highly corrosive device, and it starts fading right from the assembly line. This stubborn attribute of batteries has left many device users in awkward situations.

The fading is a serious issue and might have serious repercussions on the overall performance of devices. For example, battery fading almost made the British lose the Falklands War of 1982.

The military officers assumed the batteries would work as expected to help them quickly load missies, but the batteries failed, and missiles never initiated.

The truth about batteries is that even when you take care of the well, they only live for a specific time. Think of them like living organisms, which ultimately age and die, irrespective of how well they lived.

When manufacturing batteries, the discharge/charge cycles are defined, but rarely do batteries have a specific lifespan. The actual health of a battery largely depends on the usage patterns and environmental conditions.

 

Battery Load Testing to Predict its Life

Lead-acid batteries hit the end of life after the active materials are consumed on the cells. In the case of Lithium-Ion batteries, capacity loss happens as the transfer of ions reduces because of electrode layers buildup. The only case when you can get an unlimited number of cycles is with super-capacitors, but again, these are not real batteries!

Battery designers know that batteries lose their capacities with time, and some of them opt to stay quiet about it.

This is why you need to go beyond following ads when buying batteries for your devices. Particularly, you need to invest in good battery load testers to help you understand the health of selected batteries.

Simply put – do not just trust the information provided by the battery manufacturer without doing additional testing.

 

Importance of Using High-Quality Battery Load Testers

When designing products, it is prudent to ensure that batteries get the same focus as other critical components. This is why you need to have the best battery load testers that can help you to pinpoint the best batteries.

With the right lithium-ion battery testing equipment, you can monitor the performance of the battery and internal resistance. More importantly, the battery load testers can help you to determine the state of health of the battery, making it pretty easy to establish the battery’s ability to deliver specific current when required to.

If you manufacture batteries or devices that use batteries, it is prudent to appreciate their capacity fades with time. Therefore, you need to have the right battery testing equipment to understand and give correct information about their life to clients.