What is a battery to you. A tubular cell for your TV remote, or a flat shiny disc that unlocks your car doors? Perhaps you are one of the fortunate few who took a deep drive into electric transport. Whichever the case, there is more to batteries than you see with your eyes. So let’s take the question a step further, and find out what goes on inside batteries.
What Goes on Inside That Battery?
Batteries generate electrical power through chemical reactions. This is why we call batteries electrochemical cells. Batteries also have positive and negative connectors on their outside cases, so they can feed their electrical power to devices requiring matching energy.
Those connectors each join to their own electrode inside an individual battery. When batteries are doing their work and delivering electrical power, we call the positive electrode the cathode, and the negative one the anode. This power arrives in the device itself in the form of electrons.
Those electrons are physical subatomic particles, which means they are very, very tiny. In fact, they are what chemists call elementary particles, because they cannot divide into smaller parts. Every one of these electrons carries an electrical charge that we call electricity, in our world outside.
What Happens Outside Our Batteries?
The negatively-charged electrons flow from the negative terminal, through the external device, to the positive battery terminal. This causes a compensating redox reaction inside the battery, attracting lower, positively-charged ion molecules. The energy difference is the electrical energy given up to the device.
A single-use, primary battery continues working this way, until it gives up most of its electrical energy to the device(s). However, a user can replenish a secondary, rechargeable battery many times. This is as simple as sending electrical energy from outside the battery, and replenishing its electrical energy inside.
More Information
How Ions And Electrons Work Together
