Battery is the best source of electricity for any portable device. Many types of batteries are available in the market from different companies under various brand names. Each brand advertises its product as the best one. For batteries, the one that lasts the longest is the best one. As a consumer, you must have wondered often which battery really is the best one. Today we are going to discuss a simple experiment you can carry out to find this out for yourself.
What is Battery Life
Before you start your experiment, you should know some basic things about batteries. Batteries contain different types of solid/liquid/gel chemicals that react with the two electrodes (anode and cathode) to produce electricity. The life of battery depends on duration of these very chemical reactions. When reactions stop after the chemicals are consumed, the battery goes dead.
Power of a battery is measured in mAh (mili Ampere per hour) or Ah (Ampere per hour) and indicated on the battery. For example, if a battery is labelled 10Ah, it means the battery can deliver or take 10 ampere load for 1 hour. Or, 2 ampere load for 5 hours.
Materials Required for Experiment
Now that you understand what is meant by battery life, let’s get started with the experiment. You need to keep these things ready for conducting the experiment and recording its findings:
- 2 AA batteries of different brands. We used batteries of Energizer, Duracell, Eveready, Panasonic and Orpat for our experiment.
- Flashlights that use 2 AA batteries. One flashlight for each brand.
- Labeling sticker to mark battery brand on the flashlight.
- Notebook to record the observations.
- Clock to note timings
Procedure
The experiment will take a long time, take care to choose a day when you have time on hand, preferably a holiday. Follow these steps to set up your experiment.
- Load all the pairs of batteries into flashlights.
- Label each flashlight with the battery name for easy reference.
- Draw the table as shown below in your notebook for recording your observations.
Battery Brand | Start Time | Dim Time | End Time | Life (in hrs.) |
DURACELL | ||||
ENERGIZER | ||||
RAYOVAC | ||||
PANASONIC | ||||
ORPAT | ||||
EVEREADY |
4. Switch on all the flashlights and note down the start time.
5. Check the power of batteries every hour initially and then at half-hour intervals.
6. Note down the Dim timing for the batteries.
7. Repeat steps 5 & 6 until the batteries are all dead, or switched off.
Experiment Results
For the experiment that we did, our chart looked like this at the end of the experiment.
Battery Brand | Start Time | Dim Time | End Time | Life (in hrs.) |
DURACELL |
5 pm |
10 am |
11 am |
18 |
ENERGIZER |
5 pm |
8 am |
10 am |
17 |
RAYOVAC |
5 pm |
4:30 pm |
5 pm |
24 |
PANASONIC |
9 am |
8 pm |
8:30 pm |
11.30 |
ORPAT |
9 am |
6 pm |
9:30 pm |
9.30 |
EVEREADY |
9 am |
5 pm |
6 pm |
9 |
As you can see, Rayovac lasted the longest in our experiment. Panasonic, Orpat and Eveready went out at night, so they had to be set up again the next morning. If you have done a similar experiment or plan to do at a later date, do share the results with us.
Adding Experiment Parameters
The expiry date of the battery is an important factor for its life. So you should take care to use batteries with the same, or almost same, expiry date. You can do the experiment with the same brand of batteries with different expiry dates. This will tell you how lying idle on the shelf affects battery life. You can also compare prices of these batteries against their life. You can do the experiment to compare disposable and rechargeable batteries too.
All companies have their own standard of materials and chemicals used for making batteries. Quality and quantity of chemicals and electrodes affects the mAh or Ah factor, which is responsible for durability of battery. So next time you go to buy your AA batteries you will know which battery you should choose.
Check out our other experiments, linked below!
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