Car Portable Appliances

A galvanic cell is a electrochemical cell that stores chemical energy and makes it available in an electrical form, and a battery is a string of two or more cells in series. Other types of electrochemical cell include electrolytic cells, fuel cells, flow cells, or voltaic cells. more...

Home
Car Alarms & Security
Car Amplifiers
Car Audio In-Dash Units
Car CD Changers
Car Electronics
Car Electronics Parts &...
Car GPS Devices
Car Installation Products
Car Portable Appliances
Car Radar, Laser Detectors
Car Signal Processors
Car Speakers & Speaker...
Car Subwoofers & Enclosures
Car Video & Navigation
Other Car Electronics
Wholesale Car Audio Lots

Though an early form of battery may have been used in antiquity (the Baghdad Battery), the development of modern batteries started with the Voltaic pile, invented by the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta in 1800. According to a 2005 estimate, the worldwide battery industry generates US$48 billion in sales annually.

Formally, an electrical "battery" is a series-connected array of similar voltaic cells ("cells"). However, in many contexts it is common to call a single cell a battery.

The two types of batteries, primary and secondary, both convert chemical energy to electrical energy. However, primary batteries can only be used once, as they use up their chemicals in an irreversible reaction. Secondary batteries can be recharged because the chemical reactions they use are reversible; they are recharged by running a current parallel to the battery, with an orientation opposite to the original discharge.

History

The earliest known artifacts that may have served as batteries are the Baghdad Batteries, which existed some time between 250 BC and 640 AD. However, it is not known what electrical function they may have served, and if they were in fact batteries at all. Scientists have developed several theories about its use, including medicine (as a painkiller) and electroplating jewelry.

The story of the modern battery begins in the 1780s with the discovery of "animal electricity" by Luigi Galvani, which he published in 1791. He created an electric circuit consisting of two different metals, with one touching a frog's leg and the other touching both the leg and the first metal, thus closing the circuit. In modern terms, the frog's leg served as both electrolyte and detector, and the metals served as electrodes. He noticed that even though the frog was dead, its legs would twitch when he touched them with the metals.

By 1791, Alessandro Volta realized that the frog could be replaced by cardboard soaked in salt water, employing another form of detection. Having already studied the electrostatic phenomenon of capacitance, Volta was able to quantitatively measure the electromotive force (emf) associated with each electrode-electrolyte interface (voltage) in volts, which were named after him. Such a device is called a voltaic cell, or cell for short. In 1799, Volta invented the modern battery by placing many galvanic cells in series, literally piling them one above the other. This Voltaic Pile gave a greatly enhanced net emf for the combination, with a voltage of about 50 volts for a 32-cell pile. In many parts of Europe batteries continue to be called piles. Unfortunately, Volta did not appreciate that the voltage was due to chemical reactions. He thought that his cells were an inexhaustible source of energy, and that the associated chemical effects (e.g., corrosion) were a mere nuisance -- rather than, as Michael Faraday showed around 1830, an unavoidable by-product of their operation.

Read more at Wikipedia.org