22 Years' Battery Customization
Mar 08, 2021 Pageview：1004
Electrical quantities like voltage, current, capacitance, resistance, and the likes can either be computed in series or in parallel. And interestingly, what may apply to one may not be applicable to the others. For instance, resistance and capacitance have their different calculations.
This post will be focusing on how a parallel voltage calculation can be carried out. What are the implications of such computations? What impact can it have on the receiving load? Will it influence the resulting power? These and many other questions are some of the things we will explicate in the course of this post. You might also want to pay special attention to the computations because they can be a bit tricky at some point.
Let us start by saying that series and parallel calculations for voltage are different. The calculations may be confusing for anyone who is just seeing it for the first time. So I am going to try to be as straightforward as I can.
When you are summing up voltages in series, it is quite easy because all you need to do is add up the voltage across all the electrical load in the series ciruit. For example, if you have three 6V batteries that are connected in series, the resulting voltage will be a summation of the three voltages.
Total voltage = 6V + 6V + 6V = 18V
But, if you are computing the voltage sum of batteries that are connected in parallel, the calculation is slightly different. You need to watch it because this is where many people commit several errors.
For instance, you have three 6V batteries connected in parallel, the resulting voltage will remain the same as the potential difference between the terminals of one of the battery.
That is, it will be 6V. I guess you are surprised by this. Well, don’t be! Let us take another example so you can understand it more. If you have three 12V batteries that are connected to each other in parallel, the resulting voltage across all three batteries is 12V. It’s becoming clearer to you now, right?
This is the main reason the voltage across electrical loads connected in parallel is the same as the voltage across each electrical load.
This is a significant and factual tip that you must have at the back of your mind if you want to employ this knowledge for any reason.
In the last section, we focused on how the voltages across a number of batteries that are connected in parallel can be computed. So do you do the same computation for battery values themselves? Or is there a different way to carry out the calculation? Let’s find out as we delve into this section proper.
When you are talking about a battery, you are mostly concerned about its voltage and current values. The voltage value is the one that plays the biggest role here, because that is what you use in determining whether a particular battery can power a certain load or not. The current is only a secondary parameter.
So, in this case our focus is on the voltage. So when you are connecting batteries in parallel, what you want to know is what happens to the resulting voltage. Will it increase or decrease, or stay the same?
Similar to the computation we did earlier, battery voltages remain the same when they are connected parallel.
Therefore, anytime you have a number of batteries connected in parallel, the resulting voltage stays the same.
For those who are not aware, batteries can be connected in parallel when the positive terminals of one is connected to the positive terminal of the other. And the negative terminal is connected to the negative terminal of the second terminal.
If you have been following the article with keen interest, you would notice that we have reiterated it severally. We are going to repeat it here as well – when batteries are connected in parallel, the resulting voltage across the connected batteries remains the same. So when you connect three 4V batteries to each other, the resulting voltage across the three batteries will be 4V.
Having known this, you might be tempted to ask why batteries should be connected in parallel if the resulting battery voltage is the same as the voltage of one battery. Let’s break down the answer to that question slowly.
Let us assume you have a device that works with 12V, which automatically means you need a 12V battery to power the device, right? You are definitely going to enjoy this coming part.
This is how the parallel connection thing works:
If you connect a single 12V battery to device, it will power it and work for X hours. You get the point?
When you connect two 12V batteries in parallel to the device, the output voltage remains 12V, but the device will be able to work for 2X hours. And that means more power compared to the first scenario.
When you choose to connect three 12V batteries in parallel to the same device, the output voltage will be 12V, but the device will be powered for 3X hours. Can you see the logic and importance of having a number of batteries connected in parallel? That means you will end up using the device for more hours compared to when you use just one battery on it.
You have been able to learn some information in the course of this post. First, you now understand that series calculation and parallel computations for battery voltage are not the same. For series connection, you need to add the voltage across each battery together. But for parallel connection, the total voltage is equivalent to the voltage between the terminals of one battery. We also discussed the fact when you power a single device with multiple batteries that are connected in parallel, the device will work longer even though the voltage value will remain the same.
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