Peukert's law

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Peukert's Law, presented by the German scientist W. Peukert in 1897, expresses the capacity of a battery in terms of the rate at which it is discharged. As the rate increases, the battery's capacity decreases, although its actual capacity tends to remain fairly constant.

Peukert's law is as follows:

where:

<math>C_p \,</math> is the capacity according to Peukert, expressed in Ah.
<math>I \,</math> is the discharge current, expressed in A.
<math>k \,</math> is the Peukert constant, dimensionless.
<math>t \,</math> is the time of discharge, expressed in h.

For an ideal battery, the constant k would equal one, in this case the actual capacity would be independent of the current. For a lead-acid battery, the value of k is typically between 1.1 and 1.2 however.

The Peukert law becomes a key issue in a battery electric vehicle where batteries rated at 20 hour discharges are used at much greater rates of about 1 hour.

Watt-hour counters can be programmed with battery capacity, Peukerts exponent, and other particular batteries characteristics. They then count watt-hours and can display various information relating to the state of charge of the battery pack, including remaining energy and thus range.

[edit] References

W. Peukert, Űber die Abhängigkeit der Kapacität von der Entladestromstärcke bei Bleiakkumulatoren, Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift 20 (1897)
D. Doerffel, S.A.Sharkh, A critical review of using the Peukert equation for determining the remaining capacity of lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries, Journal of Power Sources, 155 (2006) 395–400