Friday, September 23, 2011

How can I increase the current a battery provides and still make it last for a while?

If a battery gives 1.35A max discharge, how can this be increased so that it provides 60A of discharge and also the battery needs to last and operate for atleast 30 seconds. Is there some sort of converter device that will allow this to work?How can I increase the current a battery provides and still make it last for a while?You are faced with two problems:



One is the total power capacity of the battery.



A battery is a kind of stored power, but the total amount of this power is limited by the chemical process. Once the chemical process is completed, there is no more potential to provide power.



First, power is voltage times current. But since you have not given the voltage, I will address the current issue.



You want to be able to get 1/120th of an an hour of current at 60 amps, or 500 milli-amp hours of current from your battery. Depending on the battery, that may be possible, but you would not get that from, say a AA battery.



The next problem is the speed at which the battery is able to produce this current. You say that it can produce 1.35 amperes at its maximum. But after a few seconds, you will find that that rate of power begins to drop and will continue to drop until the battery is exhausted.



If the battery could produce enough total current, it would take perhaps an hour or three to get it out. Even if it could manage to sustain its high output rate, it would take (.5 / 1.35) about 22 minutes to collect it.



As the other respondent mentioned, if you COULD collect it, if there was enough current in the battery, you could store it using a capacitor. You would charge the capacitor over the time it took to achieve enough stored current in the capacitor to provide the 60 amperes for 30 seconds, then discharge the capacitor through whatever device you wanted it for. Of course, you would need a capacitor large enough to provide that amount of current.



The equation is watts = voltage * current = 1/2 * voltage *( the size of the capacitor in farads)



From that you can see that current = 1/2 * capacitance in Farads.



So the capacitor has to be 120 farads. That is a HUGE capacitance, and while you can now get them in quite compact forms, they are pricey. I do not think you can get a total of 60 farads of capacitance for under 1,400 pounds/ 2,000 dollars!.



The last problem is that capacitors are not perfect storage devices. They always have some 'leakage' - they leak over time, and since you would need a lot of time, there would be a significant current/power loss. Which means you would need 'extra' power from the battery and a surplus of capacitance.



In sum, I think that you have set yourself a difficult task!



:How can I increase the current a battery provides and still make it last for a while?you can do this by providing a capacitor with this of appropriate capacitance which can be used to store the charge which can provide the discharge current...but...for a short while. you can also connect many batteries in parallel or go for an amplifier.....