Batteries are familiar to all of us, they are essential to our daily lives to ensure the operation of the many mobile devices we surround ourselves with. These small portable power sources are widely used by manufacturers of various types of electronic equipment. We can find them in remote controls, flashlights, phones, toys, watches and many other everyday items. In addition to these popular and small batteries, larger ones are also produced, which we call industrial batteries.
Definition of industrial battery
We can find a precise definition of industrial batteries in the Batteries and Accumulators Act of 2009. These are batteries and rechargeable batteries intended for professional use only. Thus, they can be found in industry or power vehicles. They are used for: emergency power supply (e.g. in hospitals, offices or airports), power oil rigs, lighthouses, signals for planes and trains, and serve as backup batteries in electric doors. They are also used in measuring equipment, photovoltaic devices, mining and diving flashlights, professional video equipment used in television stations, handheld payment terminals and bar code readers.
Characteristics of maintenance-free batteries
Today, most traditional acid and alkaline batteries and nickel-cadmium batteries are being replaced by modern maintenance-free lead-acid batteries. Their use brings many advantages. First of all, they do not require refilling of water and regular measurements of the density and level of electrolyte. Their great advantage is that they are leak-proof, so they do not emit gases, so they are safe and harmless to the environment and the health of workers.
Modern maintenance-free batteries are manufactured using two technologies. They can be either gel batteries, where the electrolyte is trapped in a gel form, or AGM, where the electrolyte is absorbed into separators made of fiberglass with significant porosity and placed between plates.
They can be used both for buffer operation, that is, as a source of emergency power, and for cyclic operation, when they are the primary source of power for a given device. If they operate in cyclic mode, they are disconnected and recharged when discharged. In buffer mode, they are constantly connected to the charging system, and when they recharge, they draw only a small maintenance current.
