How does the battery indicator on the battery Powercheck

You've probably seen the commercials of well-known brand of disposable batteries, which demonstrates the function of charge control, the so-called POWERCHECK. Do you know on what basis this function works and why it is bad for the battery? No, then I'll tell you everything.

Principle of operation

In fact, the technology is simple to horrible: battery applied on the polymeric material film resistor of variable width which is coated with two layers of paint. The first ink layer - a colored strip from red to light green, and the second layer is a thermal paint which becomes transparent when heated.

To minimize the design heat capacity between the polymeric film and metal thin layer batteries laid paper. Here's a simple design, and it works as follows:

Clamping pins 1 and 2, we deform polymer film, and it concerns a battery plus and minus, thereby creating a closed circuit through which electric current starts to flow.

And since our film has a different cross section, then it is not heated uniformly and at the point where its thickness is minimal heating occurs faster. As a result, thermal paint becomes transparent and we'll see the first color - red.

When the battery voltage is close to 100%, the current strength is sufficient to fully reheat thermal paint and, respectively, show the colored strip.

As soon as the current is not enough, the strip at its widest point is warming insufficient thermal paint and this place is not discolored and we thus see that the battery is partially discharged.

And as soon as you press and hold the strip, you will not see even red, it means that the battery is fully discharged.

As you probably already understand the principle of operation, this indicator may well be applied to absolutely any battery, the main disadvantage, it is necessary to remove the protective film, in order to measure the residual charge.

Just keep in mind that the frequent use of such an indicator consumes battery power, so keep that in mind. If you will often learn some charge left in a battery - will be more likely to buy new.

Like the article, then subscribe to, as in the following materials, I'll show you how you can use this indicator at home. Thanks for attention!