How does a lithium-ion battery work ?

What's this article about?

In this article, we will try to understand how lithium-ion battery works and thus we will also try to understand how to keep the battery health.

How does a battery work?

Before starting with lithium-ion batteries, let's talk about how batteries work in general. Generally, a charge is created due to the potential difference and there are two electrodes in any battery i.e. an anode and a cathode and a material called electrolyte between them. When you plug a battery into a completed circuit, a chemical reaction starts taking place at the anode and electrons start building up over there. Those electrons want to travel to the cathode, where it's less crowded, but the electrolyte between these two parts keeps the electrons from taking a short way there. This is how electrons power your device.

How does a rechargeable battery work?

So now you the battery is dead once all the electrons have made the trip. Now lets talk about a rechargeable battery. If you're using a rechargeable battery like a lithium-ion, you can reverse the process. If you dump energy into a circuit using a charger, you can force the reaction to go in the other direction and get the electron party at the anode all crowded again. Once your battery is recharged, it'll mostly stay that way until there's something for it to power again, though all batteries leak some charge over time.

The capacity of the batter 

How long it can power your stuff is what determines the capacity of the battery. The number of lithium ions that can nestle themselves into the tiny, porous craters of the anode or the cathode. Over time, with the repeated charge, the anode and the cathode degrade, and can't fit as many ions as they used to. As that happens, the battery stops holding a charge the way it once did.

Conclusion 

So that's how a battery works and a lithium-ion battery recharges itself. In next article, we will learn more about lithium-ion batteries used in phones and how to take care of them and keep them healthy.