The Battery Longest Lasts electric battery companies market their products by making impressive claims
about how exactly durable and reliable their batteries are. However which
battery lasts the longest? Will a far more expensive, brand name battery really
last longer than the usual generic battery?Download Project
Before we create a hypothesis that addresses this question, let’s find out about the two most common types of electric batteries. Alkaline batteries are made with potassium hydroxide, the industry basic solution (meaning it can neutralize a good acid). A non-alkaline battery is made along with ammonium chloride and zinc. The ammonium chloride is actually acidic. Alkaline batteries tend to be more costly than their non-alkaline counterparts, just like brand-name batteries tend to be more expensive than generics. But in each situation, what are people really paying for?
Issue
Which batteries last longer: brand-name or universal, alkaline or non-alkaline?
Materials
Several different manufacturers of AA batteries. Try to purchase batteries that have roughly the same expiration date (at least inside the same year), and note the price a person paid per battery. Here are some recommendations:
Brand-name batteries:
Rayovac
Energizer
Duracell
Eveready
Panasonic
Universal brands:
CVS
Walgreens
Rite Aid
Kirkland (Costco)
Several identical flashlights that take two AA batteries (get one flashlight for every type of battery you plan to test)
Laptop
Clock or watch
Masking tape to behave as labels
Procedure
Choose a day where you’ll have the ability to monitor your experiment all day. Make sure to start your experiment each morning!
Label each flashlight with the model of battery you'll use that flashlight to test.
Load each flashlight with two from the appropriate model of battery.
Turn all from the flashlights on at once. Note the period, and record it in your notebook.
Keep track of each flashlight until it dies. When one is out, note and record the time in your own notebook. Record your data in a chart such as this:
Battery Brand Name or Generic.Cost Expiration Date Alkaline or even Non-Alkaline? Time before Dying
Results
You may have found that name brand batteries don’t meet the hype! In addition, there isn’t necessarily a correlation between just how much a battery costs and how it works. However, you may have found that alkaline batteries keep going longer than non-alkaline batteries.
Why?
A battery generates current via a chemical reaction, where new chemicals are formed on both sides from the battery. In general, the more chemicals a battery has that may change into other chemicals, the longer this lasts, and this is partly what explains why alkaline batteries possess a slight chemical advantage over their non-alkaline counterparts.
Heading Further
A great way to expand this experiment will be testing how a battery’s expiration date affects just how long it lasts. Do older batteries perform much more poorly? Test the same brand and kind of battery, but test individual batteries with a variety of expiration dates. You could even investigate which sort of battery technology—alkaline or non-alkaline—will give a battery an extended shelf life!
