Just My Ideas about the Lead Acid Battery
When you talk about the car battery or deep cycle batteries, you will think of the lead acid battery. Because these batteries are all lead acid batteries which may be recharged after the stored energy has been used. The lead acid battery adopts a reversible chemical reaction to store energy. And it uses a combination of lead plates or grids and an electrolyte consisting of a diluted sulphuric acid to convert electrical energy into potential chemical energy and back again.
During discharge, the lead dioxide (positive plate) and lead (negative plate) react with the electrolyte of sulfuric acid to create lead sulfate, water and energy. During charging, the cycle is reversed: the lead sulfate and water are electro-chemically converted to lead, lead oxide and sulfuric acid by an external electrical charging source.
Compared with the newer energy technologies that are now sweeping the world, however, the lead acid battery has to be admitted that they look old-fashioned and a bit frumpy. However, from another perspective, lead-acid batteries are tried and trusted. They may just need a bit of pepping up.
A conventional lead acid battery is a simple affair, made up of a series of cells each containing a positive electrode made of lead dioxide and a negative electrode of metallic lead. These are immersed in an electrolyte of dilute sulphuric acid. Car batteries tend to have thin electrode plates, which allow a lot of energy to be discharged quickly, but only for a short period of time. That is fine for turning a starter motor, but it is not so good for turning an electric motor intended to move a car any distance. Moreover, a lead acid battery can be ruined if it is discharged completely, as many motorists discover to their cost when trying to start their car on an icy morning. Lead acid batteries with thicker electrodes can tolerate such “deep” discharges better than those with thin ones, but only at the expense of making a heavy battery even heavier.
Although the lead acid battery may be charged and recharged many times, each cycle places small stresses on the lead plates, which eventually distort. At this point, this causes short circuits within the battery so that the battery is not able to hold stored energy for a prolonged period. Owing to operating conditions and other factors, a number of other processes may take place in the battery. For example, if there are some scales or other non-reactive material coating the plates, this may make them difficult or impossible to recharge. So if you want to your lead acid battery to be used for longer time, you need to take care of it, then it may take care of you. It is also very important to check and maintain the lead acid battery on a regular basis.
Source: www.leoch.com
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