fairfolio
Saved Projects

Does Storage Temperature Affect Battery Life?

CSEF · 2003 Electricity & Electronics

Kasie Clark, Kelly Clark · Dartmouth Middle School, Hemet

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective of this science project is to determine if the temperature of household AA alkaline batteries are stored at will affect their life when tested in a low resistence battery draining mechanism. Methods/Materials 40 Duracell AA Alkaline batteries were divided into three groups (room temperature, freezer, and refrigerator) for 43 days. After 24 hours were allowed for them to come to room temperature they were tested in a battery draining mechanism especially designed for this project. A stopwatch was used to test the time it took for the fan on the mechanism to stop rotating. The times of all 20 trials of each temperature group were analized. Results Our results show that the Duracell batteries stored at room temperature (average 68 F and 20.43 C) lasted an average of 11.75 minutes; much longer than either the freezer or the freezer groups. Refrigerator batteries were stored at an average temperature of 38 F or 3.33 C and the freezer batteries were stored at an average temperature of 18.6 F or -7.44 C. Conclusions/Discussion Our conclusion is that room temperature is the best place to store Duracell AA Alkaline batteries of the three temperatures we tested. The batteries were stored for a period of forty three days. We were surprised to have conclusive data with this time period. We tested only Duracell batteries to control variables but we would find it interesting to test other brands!

Summary statement

Our project was to determine if it is better to store AA Alkaline batteries at room temperature, refrigerator, or in the freezer.

Help received

Hyatt Baker and Gene McGuire helped design and build the battery draining mechanism used to measure battery life (on the display table).

Competition history

  • CSEF 2003 Electricity & Electronics · Entry J0704

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google