Car battery charger
Almost 100% of cars on the roads today have a lead acid car battery within them; the exceptions to this rule at the moment are very high end Porsche cars and a few fully electric vehicles. The general usage of batteries in cars is for ignition, the starter motor and lighting, the most important out of these three being the starter motor as you need this to get the car going. Once the car is started an alternator running off a fan belt keeps the battery charged so the only time that the problem of a flat battery comes up is when you are starting the car, and when it does occur you will need a car battery charger.
To understand how car battery chargers work you really need to look at what happens inside a battery to produce power in the first place. Inside of a car battery there are lead plates which are immersed in a solution of dilute sulphuric acid, at any given time this is a chemical reaction waiting to happen, but seeing as there is nowhere for the electrons that would be produced by such a reaction to go, the reaction is permanently on hold until a complete circuit is made and then the battery can begin discharging. When a battery discharges, sulphur from the fluid binds to the lead plates as lead sulphate, when the plates are covered in lead sulphate crystals the battery will be fully discharged. In order to reverse this process, electrons in the form of a 12 volt charge must be feed back into the lead plates by a 12 volt car battery charger; this causes the sulphate to dissociate from the lead and returns the battery to its previous fully charged state.
There are different types of car battery chargers on the market but the one that is most often recommended is the trickle charger, this is a charger that will transform mains power down to 12 volts and then deliver the charge into the battery at a very slow rate of about one amp. The benefit of charging a battery so slowly is that it removes the build up of lead sulphate crystals from the plates slowly and therefore reduces that chance of a chunk of lead getting prized off at the same time. Trickle chargers run at about 12 watts so if you have a standard battery it could take anywhere up to 15 hours to charge.
The alternative to trickle charging is simply called quick charging, as the name implies the process can be carried out in a very short time however the damage caused to the lead plates through the energetic removal of sulphate means that you wouldn’t want to be using this process except for in emergencies.
Related posts: