Battery Tests

As part of another project I started doing some testing with batteries. The following shows the comparison of the performance of a 9 V alkaline battery and a "9" V NiCad battery.

I have seen figures for similar tests, but almost never with labeled axes so its hard to get anything more than a qualitative feel for the differences.

The test setup was the following:

The battery under test was powering a 78L05 5 V (100ma max) regulator.

The regulator was providing output with a 72.25 ma load.

The battery voltage and the regulator output voltages were measured simultaneously by a Forth program that was invoked every 20 minutes by cron on my Linux PC. The program read a multi-channel 12-bit A/D board made by Computer Boards Inc. and averaged 10 samples and them appended the data with a timestamp to a data file.

The alkaline battery was a new fresh Duracell® battery.

The NiCad battery was charged overnight just before doing the test.

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