Natural Science Forum / Chemistry / Electrochemistry / February 2005

Is NiMH self-discharge inherent to the chemistry, or is it construction.
Obviously, some aspects of both.
But what's the minimum self-discharge, compared to NiCd?

We are setting up different trace analysis by Stripping Voltammetry
with HMDE as the working electrode. We are going to receive soon our
mercury container, and we are trying to find out which is the best
place to contact to get mercury for this kind of analysis, which purity

is there someone who can suggest me some book about the
electrochemical measures, in the field of corrosion science (ciclic
polarization, linear polarization, EIS, etc.)?
I need particularly the practical aspects of these measures.

I've seen Rayovak and Energizer have 1-hour NiMH chargers.  Do these
work with all brand batteries or are these proprietary?

I have a digicam (Samsung Digimax V3) that uses a variety of power
sources (all of 9!), but the most sensible (practical/economical) one
appears to be AA NiMH, a pair of cells.
I have 4 NiMH (i.e. 2 pairs) that won't even work in this camera:

Now that the Radio Shack graphical battery tester (model 22-91?
22-091?) is discontinued, any suggestions on a high-end
household/consumer/photo Battery Tester? Thanks in advance for all
suggestions.

Hi, question for the experts in this forum. Is conductance a reliable
measure for checking usability of used and new consumer and camera
batteries? What about button cells and laptop battery packs? If not,
why does it work on automotive and gel batteries? Thanks for all

In the electronics industry they use the Arrhenius model for reliability
engineering, esp in migration susceptibility.
One of the figure used in the Arrhenius equation is the activation energy.
They tend to use a figure between 0.5eV and 0.9eV, and seems to be based on

Read somewhere that the "natural" voltage of lithium cells are 3 volts.
What was done to make this one around 1.8 volts?
Is it more "fragile" electrically than other AA's, if it is correct
that the "natural" voltage is 3 volts?

I will send my own probe to Mars next week, but I need batteries that
will survive in outer space.
So which batteries do I need ?

Between summer and winter I always have a few 12v batteries kicking around.
Boat batteries in the winter, Snowmobile batteries in the summer.What I
usually do  is wash the battery clean. Charge it till I get a good bubbling
action then store it on a shelf.

since i am new to this battery related stuff, i hope i posted to the correct
group (sorry if i did wrong ...)
Here is my problem.
I am from Greece and i recently received from a Chinnese friend the Samsung

I have a Sony handicam bought in 1992 and it came with a Ni-Cd charger.
Am I able to charge Ni-Hm batteries? Will it explode if I do so?

I know this is probably a very simple question for this group...but
here goes:
If I have around 20 AA batteries laying around. How can I check their
condition with a multimeter. I don't thing measuring the voltage is

I have a number of cells, some of which seem to self-discharge fairly
rapidly.
Obviously, the trivial way to do this is to do a capacity test at a week.
However, I began wondering how the decay of the initial voltage after