Experimental Evaluation of Alkaline Batteries´s Capacity for Low Power Consuming Applications

The technology advances over the recent years brought on market many portable consumer and telecommunication electronic devices, most of which utilize low-power embedded systems. Significant part of these devices is nowadays supplied from the primary batteries, among which the alkaline ones are the most widespread. The paper presents the real-life discharge curves and measurement results of available energy for various commercially available off-the-shelf alkaline batteries under continues and intermittent discharge. The specifics of the paper is that it focuses the battery discharge profiles, which are typical for the portable devices based on low-power micro controllers in general and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes in particular. Therefore, provided in the paper data is valuable both for engineers for estimating their devices´ lifetimes and for researchers for evaluating battery models or estimating performance for energy efficiency improvement mechanisms. Besides, the presented results reveal importance of battery characteristics consideration for lifetime improvement and demonstrate need for energy-source aware optimization algorithms for battery supplied systems in general and for WSN especially.