The Right Way to Charge and Discharge Your High Operating Battery Temperature

Batteries can’t be charged or discharged at all temperatures. Special care is required, especially in case of charging. Moderate temperature is the main requirement for any charging process, as extreme temperatures, hot or cold, will reduce a battery’s charge acceptance.

Charging at low temperatures

The temperature range of 10-30 ⁰C enables a battery, especially one made of nickel, to maintain its capacity to recombine hydrogen and oxygen with each other. One should avoid charging nickel batteries below the temperature of 5 ⁰C as it prevents fast charging and subsequent venting. Also, maintain their charge current at 0.1 ⁰C for below freezing situations.

Lead acid batteries are more tolerable of extreme temperatures because of their notoriously sluggish nature. For these batteries, it’s recommended to keep 0.3 ⁰C as its standard charge rate.

Avoid permanent damage of these batteries by preventing freezing and keeping them fully charged. You must stop their electrolyte from becoming like water so that flooding is avoided and issues like leakage, loss of potency and need for a replacement don’t arise in the first place.

Charging at high temperatures

Heat endangers a battery’s life and reduces it by a great measure. In fact, in case of lead acid batteries, a temperature compensation tool is added so that temperature variations can be handled and adjusted.

While charging your high operating temperature battery, you should make sure that ideal peak voltage is obtained at different temperatures. Same is the case with float voltage at standby mode.  

Users of nickel batteries should avoid high temperatures at any cost in order to avert decreased charge acceptance and reduced oxygen generation. Conversely, Li-ion batteries have a great performance record at higher temperatures, but at the same time, continued exposure must be avoided. You can’t let these batteries lose their capacity because of elevated temperatures, especially when it comes to surgical tools.

Discharging at low and high temperatures

Following points must be kept in mind while discharging your battery at low and high temperatures:

• Don’t use cold temperatures, like -18 ⁰C, as they reduce a battery’s capacity and increase its internal resistance.

• Use a temperature range of 60 to 100 ⁰C for dry and solid polymer batteries so that they become more conductive and their ion flow is promoted.

• Use optimum temperatures like 20 ⁰C to ensure best service life of your battery. Make sure that your battery’s cycle life is optimum.

• Try to prevent the development of a negative potential difference in voltage of your battery by looking for matched cells which come with same capacities. Avoid heavy load, over-discharge and cell reversal, if you don’t want to experience battery failure.

Altogether, proper charging and discharging ensure prolonged life, better charge acceptance, enriched battery capacity and superior performance.

Battery Usage - Basic Difference Between Standby Use and Cyclic Use

To understand the difference between standby use and cycle use, it is important to first understand the definition of standby use and cycle use. When a battery is used as a regular power source it is also being discharged and recharged afterwards, it is known to be in cyclic use. However, standby use is the term used when the battery gets used as an emergency source of power during the power cut time.

Let us understand the difference between standby use and cycle use based on some factors:

• Voltage Requirement: The voltage needed by a battery to get completely full is called cycle use, but it should not be kept at that voltage because it does not suit the cell life. However, the voltages on which the battery can be kept at one time to keep it in good shape and stored till you need it.

• Life Cycle: The factor determining the life of cyclic use is the total number of discharge and charge cycles which can be completed. However, in standby use the design life is up to five years.

• Usage: Cyclic use is often used for discharging and charging of electrical equipment including household appliances and motorbikes, etc. whereas standby is used as the power backup source of energy. Situations wherein there is a sudden outage of the electricity, standby use batteries are used.

• Battery Performance: Standby use batteries have a longer shelf life due to its ability to store the power for a longer period. Generally, cyclic batteries performance depends on different parameters like depth of charges and discharges, type of charging factors and methods. Also working temperature of the batteries.

• Up to 1000 charge and discharge cycles are expected and depend on the average depth of discharge whereas in standby battery stays connected to a charger that ensures the battery to be fully charged and ready to be used.

• Cyclic use can also be understood with the term Direct Power Source whereas Standby Use means to back up power source.

• Standby application is a typical use for an industrial system in the form of equipment like Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) whereas for cyclic use a usual application system is electrical power loading system.

It is to be remembered that some of the lead batteries are commonly used in standby condition, where they are very rarely cycled, but also kept on charge constantly. Such batteries live long, if charged under a certain voltage.