Hi! I've got another interesting battery video for you. Now, if you don't know,, I've got a ton of battery videos, so click here if you want to have a look at the playlist. I've got like a dozen videos or something like that on all sorts of things to do with battery tech and The Batterizer as well, groan. Anyway, this video was suggested by a viewer, Mark Thank you very much for; he was, what the story is, is Mark Saw my video where I would test the capacity of a battery by dropping them on their end like this, Its easy with "AA"s.

That has to do with the electrochemstry in the battery. its a real phenomenon and things like that. Anyway, he was experimenting with this and he came across something interesting I Wont tell you that yet, but what I'm going to do is I've got two fresh "AA", sorry "AAA" Duracells here Mark assures me it works with "AA"s and "AAA"s I'll use "AAA"s because well, its easier to discharge these things. So, First, let's label these, so we know what one's what.

Cause We're going to have two different batteries at the end of it "A" and "B", there we go. So, we know exactly what we've got now. Fresh Battery straight from the pack 1.6174 Volts Let's do the other one 1.6174... We'll do battery "B" First,, it makes no difference.

Pretty darn close, right,? they're identical batteries straight fresh from the pack, I'm not sure what the expiry date is Doesn't matter. I'm gonna discharge these at half an amp for an hour. So 500 milliamps constant current discharge I'm gonna use my BK Precision electronic load here to extract 500 milliamp-hours from these things. Now that's a high current for a "AAA" So, these things are rated for about 500 or 600 mAh capacity At 500 milliamps, so pretty much should be draining these things fairly well.

So, I won't bore you with the details of actually showing you this, but I'm going to discharge at half an amp and we're going to go into the battery mode, here. and the stop voltage. I'm gonna set it at like .1 volts 'cause I don't care what the cutoff voltage is and the stop capacity. Half an amp.

Half an amp-hour So I'm gonna extract 500 mAh capacity from the battery. So, and then the stop timer 3600 seconds. Well, let's go for an hour. Ok, so it will stop on either of those two conditions.

and uh, are we go reset, clear readings up here. OK Maybe I've gotta trigger it. Sorry I'm not used to using this thing. Ah! There we go.

I Just triggered it. OK So We're off and running. Just had to trigger it. And this shows the elapsed time.

This shows the elapsed capacity. And then we're drawing half an amp and the voltage is dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping. So, I'll come back, By the way;, yes,, it is a four terminal measurement. I've got the "sense" wires going around to the "sense" terminals on the back so that we're getting the true battery voltage on there, and not just the one.

and no loss in the wires here. We're already at half our capacity. 257 mAh Extracted from this puppy and we're right down to 1.07 volts. So ehh,, getting down there.

And There we have it, it switched off I'm not sure why because it didn't get to our 500. mAh, it got to 489 and it didn't get to 3600 seconds. OH! Hang on! No? Did it? Hang on, auto-scale No, look at that, it dropped. Nah, it's the curve.

It Dropped right off. We Killed that suckka Lookit That Haha! It actually went down to, what did we have? 0.1 volt cut-off voltage or something So It actually plummeted right down. It jumped right back up and we're actually back up to one point... eh,, 1.23 volts now.

So... that's alright,, that's pretty well discharged. You Can see that after about 20 minutes or so, it's actually recovered a fair bit to 1.31 volts. But of course that is the electro-chemistry at play.

doing that. There's not actually any, you know. extra capacity,. it's not gaining any extra capacity by doing that, it still has some extra capacity in it if we drain it again,, but not a huge amount.

OK, we've done battery "B". Discharge 500, roughly 500 mAh Worth Eh, let's try battery "A". shall we? And let's go for the exact same conditions again.. Let's do it.

There we go. and... trigger Ta-da! Down she goes.. And once again, it gets under that 0.8 volts.

it really starts to drop like a rock. Oh Yeah, here she goes. Count It down, .4, .39, .38... ....37, .36, .35...

It's about to cut out, but yeah, so we're really brutalizing this battery. There We go, bam! and it should cut off. There We go. It stopped once it hit that 0.1 volt cut-off.

Beauty So You can see that we basically extracted the same as we did before I think it was 489 or something. So, but basically we drained these two batteries identical No worries Alright! Now for the fun part. Right, so let's actually take battery "A". now, which has been sitting here for a while and we'll whack that one back in and, eh,, let's start the exact same discharge again and see how much extra capacity we can get out of it over and above that 490-odd mAh that we got before.

So We'll switch that on again... and bat, boom, boom, all the same conditions. everything's hunky-dory Let's go... clear readings, it's all reset.

and off we go.. And You can actually see that it starts to drop off fairly quickly. Just switched it on and bam, straight back down. I Mean we can auto, auto-scale that and wham, because there's not much capacity left in this thing.

The Electro-chemistry is causing the ESR to rise fairly drastically at the bottom of the capacity curve and its gonna drop off. Pretty quick feel for how much extra capacity we'll get out of it. Eh..., I Don't know.... another 100...

maybe?? eh, possibly 200 because you can actually pulse these batteries. They don't just have one discharge, then they're dead due to the electro-chemistry Once again, its the keyword. they keep having you know you can pulse 'em then they'll drop down. Actually, here's a pulse shot, I'll include it from some datasheet or some data somewhere so they can actually have, even though you've drained them once.

If you let them recover a bit, they don't gain capacity, but you can actually extract a little bit more back out of them. And Check it out, I Think she's about to drop off a cliff Look At this, squeezed an extra 130 mAh out of this thing so my guess wasn't too far off the mark, So yeah, this will plummet very quickly. Here it goes! Yeah Let's call it 139. mAh, will we make 140? Extra? And, bam it should cut out...

Now. There we go. Stopped, 140 mAh extra. Bingo! OK, so that's our control with battery "A".

Now You might be wondering why on earth I have this vise here and this is the interesting part about it! When Mark Was playing around with this. He was violently dropping these things and he noticed that he got some increase, Or he thought he got some increase battery capacity by actually shocking them like this.. And Many, you know, weeks of playing around. finally came to the conclusion that if you actually put it in a vise and you squeeze it, you can actually get some increased capacity out of this thing.

And He says it works with both "AA"s and "AAA"s. So, we've already discharged "A" So let's take "B" and let's eh, whack it in the vise here OK Here we go, let's whack it in and... I've no idea... how much to squeeze it by.

I Guess we need like a graph of eh... compression vs. eh... Woah! You can't see me but I am sort of tightening that puppy up.

and eh, compression vs. added capacity or supposedly. So, let's... I'm, trust me.

I've... I don't know how many millimeters I've changed that by. But anyway,, let's whack this in. and see...

if it actually makes a difference in the actual battery capacity. So let's eh.... plug it in and... we're getting our 1.35 that we got before.

So Let's... where are we? shift, battery... Let's do exactly the same thing we got before. So Let's start...

and... let's see if that actually works. So Let's give it, Oh! Did I restart? Clear that, sorry. Do I restart it? Anyway, I Missed the initial drop there..

But anyway,, lets come back see if we... What did we get for "A"? We Got our extra 140 mAh out of that puppy, for exactly the same repeat test again. So Let's see what we get out of this one, we're expecting, you know there will be some error of course. So if it's you know better than 100, say if it's over 200, then well, we've got something.

And, looks like we're kicking some serious butt! 169... 1.02 volts. Wha-hey! And There you have it! Check It out! 261 mAh! The other one only got 140. There is definitely something in this, this worked.

An absolute treat! Now If we have a quick look here at the squeezed one on the left and the not squeezed one on the right, the response: You notice that they both started out at that 1.35 volt recovery voltage, but the one that wasn't squeezed of course plummeted very quickly. You can see it on the right there, and then just flattened out. Whereas The squeezed one had an entirely different response. It didn't get that immediate drop down.

There's like a linear ramp. well,, kinda, sorta.. And Then it flattens out and they both ended up,. You'll notice the time difference: 1.08 for the non squeezed and 1.02 for the squeezed.

Roughly about the same volts, but the squeezed one got to that voltage after 1220 seconds, whereas the not squeezed one got there only after 36 seconds. So, a lot of extra capacity under that curve. Amazing! And There you have it, that is actually a huge, significant increase in the battery capacity of this thing, given that this is the second pulse right down after we completely drained it the first time. We only got 140 mAh extra out of this, 261 mAh extra, after squeezing the thing in a vise! Unbelieveable! That's 19% more, doesn't sound like a lot, but that's 19% more overall capacity.

Let's round it up and say 20%. That is a... ...quite... ...a very significant increase.

So I'm gonna have to run this again at like,, you know, different squeeze pressure in there for each battery, and see how much of a difference it actually makes. See There's obviously going to be a limit to this thing,. there's something weird happening with the electro-chemistry in here. the ionic resistance.

And with hindsight is not hugely surprising because I actually did a video that kind-of, you know, almost saw this. Eh,, basically hinted at this. I showed that pressing on a 9 volt battery can actually change its ionic resistance. So A similar sort of thing is happening here, but I Don't have the chemical know-how to know exactly what is going on in these batteries.

But There you go! Hey! Batterizer, eat your heart out! Heh. Don't need a batterizer. not that that was, the damn thing was ever going to work anyway. All You've gotta do is squeeze your batteries in a vise! In Fact: You probably don't even need a vise,, you can probably just put 'em on a hard surface and then I Don't know,, stomp on them or something like that.

So Give that a try. Im Gonna have to do some more testing of this, but I Just wanted to quickly verify that. Yeah,, this is confirmed! You Can actually get extra capacity out of your batteries by squeezing them. Brilliant! If You liked the video, please give it a big thumbs up.

And as always, comments and everything down below. I'm definitely going to be following this one up. But Because it takes so long to actually test these, I Wanna do it on some "AA"s, I did it on "AAA"s just to be really quick to just confirm it, and definitely, confirmed! Very Interesting, so anyone out there who has the chemistry experience to explain what's going on here and it would be good to see people replicate it as well. And So please, give it a try.

Leave it in your comments, just try and stomp on them. I Reckon that's a winner 'cause you're not always going to have a vise available. something to control the pressure. So I reckon hard surface, and a good whack.

...like a pair of thongs if you're in. Australia No worries! Anyway, hope you've enjoyed the video. If you did,, please give it a big thumbs up! Catch ya next time. *This is quite fascinating.

OK Watch what happens if I squeeze this battery* *Woo-hoo! look at that!* *Let's give that a little press, yep* *Goes up, just like the the Vadda one.* *Confirmed!* *Two Different types* *We've discovered two different types of alkaline* *construction* *nine volt batteries* *Wow* *That is fascinating*. *Is, yeah, squeeze again*. *It's done exactly the same thing.*.