Mysteries Behind Batteries

Do you ever wonder,"can my smartphone ever stay a minute longer" well it can,if you know the mysteries of Batteries.

Batteries allows us to use a lot of gadgets and appliances such as smartphones and power banks without anchoring us to an entangling of power cables,Even the best batteries would diminish slowly,losing capacity until they finally run down.
You must be wondering, How are batteries storing so much electric charge? Well it all started with a little history on batteries.

BRIEF HISTORY ON BATTERIES
It all started with two italian scientists,

luigi Galvani and

Alessandro Volta and even a frog in 1780,they both argued about what happened to the frog.
It's is said that as Galvani was studying a frog's leg,he brushed a metal instrument against one of it's nerves, making the leg jerk,Galvani then called this Animal Electricity cause he believed that a type of electricity was stored in the very life of the frog, but Volta disagreed stating that it was the metal itself that made the metal itself that made the leg twitch.
The argument was eventually resolved with Volta experiment (known today).

VOLTS REACTION

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Alessandro Volta tested is idea with a stack of alternating layers of zinc and copper which were separated by a piece of paper or clothing which has been soaked in a salt water solution(we call this the Volta's cell or voltaic pile). What happened in the Volta's cell is known as :

• Oxidation

• Reduction

The zinc oxidises which means it loose electrons which are transferred and gained by ions in the water,the process called reduction.
The oxidation and reduction cycle creates flow of electron between two substances and if you put an electrical appliance like a light bulb between them,the appliance is been powered up.

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Since then, scientists have improved on Volta’s design. They've replaced the chemical solution of salt solution with dry cells filled with chemical paste, but the principle remains the same.
Principle being that a metal oxidises and sends electrons to do some work before they are regained by a substance being reduced. But any normal battery has a limited supply of metals being oxidized,and when most of it has been oxidized,the battery dies,so this brings us to rechargeable batteries.

RECHARGEABLE BATTERIES

Rechargeable batteries has a temporary solution to this problem that any normal batteryhas by making the Oxidation-Reduction process reversible.
The reversibility makes it so that electrons would flow back in the opposite direction with the application of Electricity, Plugging in a charger to the battery and the outlet which draws the electricity from the wall outlet and drives the reaction to regenerate the metal,making more electrons available for oxidation the next time to be used.

Main problem is that,even rechargeable batteries don't last forever,cause overtime,the repetition of this process prevents the battery from oxidizing properly,this causes irregularities on the metal surface,so therefore electrons are not available to flow through the metal surface (and so the battery dies permanently). Some everyday rechargeable batteries will die after just hundreds of discharge-recharge cycles,while newer advanced batteries such as smartphones and digital cameras *batteries” can survive thousands of discharge-recharge cycles.
But some cars charge while on motion or by using solar,and until this can be incorporated on simple normal batteries,we should all be hoping for a breakthrough in the future of batteries or continue to depend on electric charging for the meantime.

Batteries of the future would be able to have a hundreds of thousands discharge-recharge cycles by using principles of quantum physics.

Stay tuned for my next post which would be talking mainly on Car Batteries.