Battery Arrangement And Power

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The Battery ranks amongst the most important innovations of the 20th century. These are used everywhere from portable radios to flashlights, and we usually use more than one cell at a time. They are grouped, either serially to form higher voltages, or in parallel to form higher currents. In a serial arrangement, the voltages add up while in a parallel arrangement, the currents add up.

Assuming that each cell produces 1.5 volts, then four batteries in parallel will also produce 1.5 volts, but the current supplied will be four times that of a single cell. In a serial arrangement, the four voltages add together to produce 6 volts.

Battery packages list the voltage and current rating. For example, a digital camera might use four nickel-cadmium batteries that are rated at 1.25 volts and 500 milliamp-hours for each cell. The milliamp-hour rating means, theoretically, that the cell can produce 500 milliamps for one hour, though there are many permutations to their use. A 500 milliamp-hour battery could produce 5 milliamps for 100 hours, or 10 milliamps for 50 hours, or 25 milliamps for 20 hours, or (theoretically) 500 milliamps for 1 hour, or even 1,000 milliamps for 30 minutes.

However, batteries are rarely that linear. For one thing, all batteries have a maximum current they can produce and at higher current levels, batteries can produce a lot of heat, which wastes some of their power. Also, many battery chemistries have longer- or shorter-than-expected lives at very low current levels. But milliamp-hour ratings are somewhat linear over a normal range of use. Using the amp-hour rating, you can roughly estimate how long the battery will last under a given load.

Batteries have proven to be one of the most important inventions of the 20th century and are becoming more so as we continue the shift toward a more mobile lifestyle. In the future, batteries will grow smaller, more powerful and longer lasting in order to keep up with our fast paced, portable world.

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