A decade in the past, most of us had been pissed off each day by the period of time it took to cost our smartphones. Producers acknowledged that frustration and commenced to introduce numerous sorts of quick charging and speedy charging applied sciences. At this time, you would possibly have the ability to go from zero to nearly a full cost in about an hour, relying in your cellphone mannequin and the charger. However that will make you surprise in case you’re damaging your cellphone’s battery. To search out out if it does, GreatScott! constructed a cost and discharge testing rig.
There may be good motive to be involved about quick charging. If that does not hurt the battery, then why did not smartphone producers make the most of it from the start? The battery chemistry (Lithium-Ion) is identical and it might have been trivial to construct compact chargers that output sufficient present a number of many years in the past. The reply is likely to be within the charging methodology, with trendy quick chargers taking care to output energy in a means that avoids injury. GreatScott! needed a concrete reply primarily based on actual experiments, he simply wanted a technique to cost and discharge a bunch of batteries many instances.
GreatScott! needed to carry out 100 discharge/cost cycles for every of the six check batteries. Folks are likely to cost their smartphones each night time, in order that simulated about 100 days of typical use. To carry out the check in an affordable period of time, GreatScott! constructed six charging stations. An Arduino Nano improvement board controls every of these by a customized PCB, with a small OLED display displaying the voltage and variety of cost cycles at any given time. The discharge circuit attracts precisely 1A of present by an op-amp any time it’s energetic, changing the battery’s electrical energy into waste warmth.
The outcomes had been attention-grabbing. The batteries charged at the usual 1A of present had negligible degradation that fell inside an affordable margin of error. However the batteries quick charged at 5A confirmed a noticeable lower in capability. They misplaced a median of 1.6% capability over these 100 cycles. That may not sound like a lot, however it might grow to be important over the course of a few years if the speed of capability loss remained fixed. And GreatScott! suspects that the speed would really improve, which might make the issue way more extreme.
We would prefer to see extra checks to find out how the speed of capability loss modifications. Nevertheless, it’s already cheap to conclude that you need to keep away from quick charging when doable if you wish to lengthen the lifetime of your smartphone battery.
