Terms about battery - Must-know in the mobile age

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The battery capacity of Galaxy S6 released in April is 2,550mAh, and Galaxy S6 Edge has the capacity of 2,600mAh.

 

Battery capacity is directly related to the hours you can use your smartphone, so it is one the major specifications that users are highly interested. Do you know what 'mAh', a unit of battery capacity, exactly means?

 

 

Capacity and output​

 

 

'Capacity' is the most important feature when it comes to battery. Capacity means, simply put, "How much electricity can a battery stores?", and technically it means the number of electrons stored in the battery. The easiest way to increase capacity is to make it large. But in this mobile age, large batteries are useless. Therefore we have three main techniques to increase capacity with the same- or even smaller-size battery. These techniques are using active material that emits more electrons at a time, making active material smaller and lighter to hold more electrons, and making spacious room for storing particles. Through these techniques, batteries are getting smaller and lighter, but its capacity gets rather higher

 

While capacity indicates how much it has, output means how much it can use at a time. For example, a marathon runner uses his energy little by litter over a long time, while a shot putter exerts his whole strength of energy in a very short period of time even though they both have the same amount of energy. Likewise, with the same amount of electrons stored, a battery of large output releases large amount of electrons at once but it has shorter life span, while a battery with small output has small amount of electrons released at a time but it lasts longer.​

 

Battery output varies depending on the circumstances. If you're using your smartphone only to make a call, you may use it for a long time because it needs less electricity which means smaller output. But playing video requires large amount of electricity, in turn, high output, which reduces the available time of your phone. Besides, a protection circuit is designed inside the battery that controls the output not to exceed the maximum level.​

 

 

 

Charging and discharging​

 

 

In this mobile age, our wish should be "Fast charging and slow discharging"

Charging is the process of storing electricity into the battery, and discharging is the process of consuming the stored electricity.

 

Let me explain more about discharging. If you connect the anode of a battery to its cathode through wire or circuit of a device, electrons are naturally moving from the place of low electric potential, the cathode, to where the potential is high, the anode. We call this process discharging.

 

 

So far we have considered some terminologies about battery. We hope you feel a step closer to the battery – an essential thing in our mobile life