| That reminds me, I stumbled upon some very interesting discussion here while doing some research on lion characteristics a few weeks ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lithium-ion_battery/Archiv... But real batteries are obviously unaware of these sources because there are numerous examples in the wild that have been regularly fully discharged (to 2.8 to 3.0 volts), stored at around 20 °C and kept fully charged in between times. These batteries are over 12 years old and are fully functional. The data in the article suggests that these batteries would have expired years ago, so something is clearly wrong. In fact, real world batteries can last 15 years or more. The one thing on that site that I can positively say is false is the claim that batteries degrade if discharged below 30% charge. I can say this because myself and 2 colleagues made this defect up and deliberately planted it for the guy who actually runs BatteryUniversity to find and incorporate into the site (and he did it within 2 weeks). It was about the most harmles thing we could think of, but several manufacturers did incorporate features in their products to warn of impending discharge below 30% charge (and to be fair, probably did it with the best of intentions). Actually, most lithium-ion cells have excellent shelf lives (10% loss of charge in 8 years, and military cells still delivering full capacity after 20 years of collecting dust Li-ion batteries are only dead after 2 years if they are abused or their charge/discharge life is used up. Properly cared for real world Li-ion batteries last for 10 years or more (in spite of Isador Buchmann's claim to the contrary). |
Note that he explicitly confirms that Li-ion batteries have a limit on the number of charge/discharge cycles they can handle. That's precisely the problem this technology is supposed to fix.