When we say a battery is ‘spent’ we should actually say ‘it no longer has sufficient energy for our device’. That’s because single-use batteries never run down completely, unless there is a terminal event. Scientists at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan wondered, can we recover energy from spent batteries and they actually did.
Yes, We Can Recover Energy from Spent Batteries
Peter Brown wrote an overview of that research in IEEE Explore we link to below. He explains in Electronics 360 how this particular study focused attention on single-use batteries that we cannot safely recharge. Moreover, these are common in self-powered devices, flashlights, and tools he says. And some users still don’t recycle them responsibly.
As a result, millions of these tiny electrical energy-storage cells end up in landfill, where they may leech into the soil for centuries. The root cause is many of them are simply not economically-viable to recycle. But if we could increase their net value then that could change.
How the Batteries Released their Remaining Charge
The researchers began with a simulated study, in which they first established a range of recoverable energy. When those results were positive, they went ahead and developed a hardware prototype to put their theory to the test. During this phase they achieved an energy recovery-efficiency of between 33% and 46%.
Digging a little deeper, they used two different recovery methods as follows:
- A self-adaptive pulse discharge one (SAPD) recovered 50% of the energy.
- However, a short-circuit discharge one (SCD) only recovered 32% of it.
“While there seems to be no advantage in draining a small amount of energy from a single discarded battery,” they admit. “The recovered energy significantly increases if a large number of waste batteries are exploited.”
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