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Uses of Battery Cell include providing backup power during a power outage. At home, the batteries are typically wired to electrical appliances. If the power goes down, these appliances still receive power. For example, many customers have energy rates that change based on the time of the day. Batteries can help these customers manage their energy by storing energy during low-cost times and discharging energy during high-cost times. Batteries can store energy from solar and wind and discharge it when it is needed the most. In this article, let us study the applications and uses of batteries.

Applications of Batteries

Batteries are small essential components to operate many devices.

• House

• Health Instruments

• Medical

• Logistics and construction

• Firefighting and Emergency

• Military

Uses of Batteries

• Battery Use in Home

Disposable batteries power things like remote controls, torchlight, etc. Rechargeable batteries such as alkaline batteries are used in digital cameras, handheld video game consoles, cellphones, and many more. Advanced batteries like lithium batteries power appliances draw too much power, example: laptops and other devices.

• Battery Use in Health Instruments

Artificial limbs, hearing aids, insulin pumps, valve assistance devices use batteries. Mercury batteries can be useful for photographic light meters and electronic devices such as real-time clocks in appliances.

• Battery Use in Medical Sector

ECG heart monitor is hooked up with a battery so that it can be moved with the patient and is always ON for showing the patient’s vitals. In hospitals, rechargeable batteries such as lithium-ion batteries and nickel-cadmium batteries are used.

• Battery Uses in Logistics and Construction

Heavy-duty batteries are used to power devices such as forklift because exhaust fumes and carbon monoxide while combustion might prove dangerous in confined work areas. The lead-acid battery is used for starting, lighting, and ignition of automobiles.

• Battery Use in Firefighting and Emergency Response

Batteries are used in radios which is very important for emergency response. These radios use large batteries in order to hold large charges. ECGs, flashlights, and even metal or fire detectors use batteries. Every day these devices help to save lives.

• Batteries Uses in Military Operations

Batteries power the radios which are used to communicate. Even infrared goggles are powered by batteries. Lithium provides much longer life to devices, and silver oxide batteries are used in military and submarines.

• Batteries Use in Vehicle

The batteries of electric vehicles are usually rechargeable. Generally lithium-ion batteries are used in electric vehicles.

Lithium future

TAmounts vary depending on the battery type and model of vehicle, but a single car lithium-ion battery pack (of a type known as NMC532) could contain around 8 kg of lithium, 35 kg of nickel, 20 kg of manganese and 14 kg of cobalt, according to figures from Argonne National Laboratory.

Analysts don’t anticipate a move away from lithium-ion batteries any time soon: their cost has plummeted so dramatically that they are likely to be the dominant technology for the foreseeable future. They are now 30 times cheaper than when they first entered the market as small, portable batteries in the early 1990s, even as their performance has improved. BNEF projects that the cost of a lithium-ion EV battery pack will fall below US$100 per kilowatt-hour by 2023, or roughly 20% lower than today (see ‘Plummeting costs of batteries’). As a result, electric cars — which are still more expensive than conventional ones — should reach price parity by the mid-2020s. (By some estimates, electric cars are already cheaper than petrol vehicles over their lifetimes, thanks to being less expensive to power and maintain.)

In order to make lithium-ion batteries cheaper, scientists at Pennsylvania State University in the US are looking at lithium iron phosphate batteries, which use different electrode elements.

Anxiety around the range fully charged EVs can cover is also driving carmakers to develop batteries that use a solid component that separates the electrodes, rather than a liquid one. These are safer and can power EVs further than 300 miles on a single charge.

But lithium batteries have a problem. Lithium is a relatively rare element on Earth compared with most minerals in common use. As demand for batteries increases, the price of lithium will increase sharply. This has prompted geologists to search for new sources of lithium worldwide, often with their own high costs. For example, the extraction of lithium from salt flats in Chile consumes lots of water, which is in short supply there. Cobalt is also scarce compared with similar metals like iron, and ores are concentrated in the politically unstable Congo region of Africa.

One solution may be to get more use out of what we already have. With more than a million electric cars sold worldwide in 2017, a number increasing rapidly, scientists are studying how to recycle lithium on a massive scale. Some are considering whether bacteria could help them achieve this.

Lithium is also a very reactive metal, presenting challenges for people tasked with handling it.

There are also potential alternatives to lithium. For example, sodium-ion batteries are gathering interest from EV manufacturers due to their lower cost. They work similarly to lithium-ion batteries but sodium is heavier and stores less energy.

Somewhat further into the future are multivalent batteries, where the ion that moves between electrodes has a greater charge than lithium and so delivers more than one electron each to the circuit. There are substantial challenges for scientists to overcome with these batteries, but they could potentially deliver even higher energy storage.

Building enough electric cars at a price that will make them cheaper than fossil fuelled alternatives is a major challenge. At the fore of battery research, scientists are working to solve this problem and revolutionise how we travel.