Investigation on intermittent discharging for lead-acid batteries

This paper studies the operating characteristics of lead-acid batteries under intermittent current discharge. A periodical resting time is added on purpose in each discharging cycle to observe its impact on the batterypsilas releasable capacity. Experimental results reveal that the batteries with intermittent discharge restore higher loaded voltages and thus can release more capacity. This effect is found to be more significant for an intermittent current at a higher frequency and at the stage when the battery is deeply discharged. A two-stage discharging profile can be scheduled to deliver the most capacity. However, experimental results show that the average current plays the most important role in current discharging. With the same average current, the most capacity with intermittent discharge is approximately equal to that with constant current discharge.