Natural Science Forum / Chemistry / Electrochemistry / July 2004

How do multi-voltage chargers (specifically, cordless power tool battery
chargers) determine whether the battery pack installed is a 7.2, 9.6, 12,
14.4, 18, or 24 volt pack before charging it? If any one of these is quite
depleted, it won't register its nominal voltage until it's ...

I'm impressed.  But then it doesn't take much to impress me.
http://www.sionpower.com/pages/sion_technologysummary.php

How do you correctly spell ... Badderee?

I recently bought an electric forklift at an auction.  The battery has 18
cells ( I assume 36 Volts) and weighs 2000 lbs. There are caps on top to
check fluid level.  I could not get it to work.  What can I do to rejuvenate
an older battery of this size.  I do have a 3-phase 100 amp ...

Why are batteries so expensive, like 10,000 time more so than AC power?

I have a pair of ten year old Panasonic 6V 10Ah SLA batteries.  Of
course, it's completely dead, but I noticed something unusual.
When I turn the thing around, I can hear something like small rocks

I've been reading an app note found on line about this controller, but I
can't find data sheets for the IC itself.
App note:
http://tinyurl.com/6myzh

Can "fast" battery chargers be designed (ie, temperature sensors, etc.) such
that they don't reduce battery longevity? Or it an immutable fact of battery
life that fast charging makes for an early demise?
An interesting thing I discovered: the Rigid brand of cordless power tools

My digital camera (Olympus C310) use 2 x 1.5 V AA-batteries. Does it exist
any reasonabe rechargeable equivalent battery? Or any other durability
solution (external batt. pack, high power alcaline...)
NiMH has 1.2 V per cel and this is too low voltage for this camera. I can

Did you know you can turn a 1.5V battery into a 3V battery of half the
capacity?
What you do is you slice the battery in half lengthwise (works best with C or
D) and seal the rest of the metal cans, making sure not to make contact with

Dear fellow computer users,
I'm thinking about buying this brand new 10+ hour external laptop
battery that I surfed into on the web at http://www.batterygeek.net
Anyways, i'm running this prehistoric IBM Thinkpad with a very sad

Does anybody know how the dielectric constant of water dependes on pH-value.
Thank you.

Keep in mind this is just preliminary thoughts, before you start
nit-picking or demanding a UL approved design. If you don't even
accept the practice of discharging parallel strings of cells (without
diodes and such) don't waste your breath.

So what are the impediments to using Li-ions again?
Temperature?  Li-ion doesn't work well in low temperature.
Cycles?  Li-ion doesn't do high number of "cycles" very well.
Are these fixable at all?  Is there any research to suggest that

Could you please recommed a book/web site/etc. to learn the simulation
of electrochemical processes.
Thank you.