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Author Topic: Reconditioning a cell phone battery? Is it possible to restore life span?  (Read 41268 times)

Mark69

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Has anyone reconditioned their cell phone battery to its original or close to original life span?  I have to charge mine every other day now, it used to last several days to a week when new.  If you have been able to restore its charged "life span", please let me know how I can do it.  My battery is the Motorola BC60, used in the "Sliver".

Thanks,
Mark

ramset

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Mark
absolutely works
Google dendrite removal NiCad battery
I have'nt done a small one yet, but will when I get back home in a few days [have a few hundred packs to do]
I'll let you know the best way.

Chet

Cloxxki

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Laptop batteries like the fridge. Might be different for cell phone batst.

jadaro2600

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Pulse or burp charging the battery may be a good way to restore it, granted, the pulsing may free up some crystals or what have you on the inside, it's better to restore the charge afterward with a normal charge cycle.

You may even try a complete discharge, followed by pulsing, then charging.

infringer

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This would be a fairly cheap open source project....

What I know so far is that if you take two like batteries from a dewalt drill and hook them together it will revive a non working dead battery that will not take a charge.

so the steps are:

charge good battery to full
hook up both batteries for 15 seconds
disconnect and let sit for 15 minutes
put dead battery in charger
Repeat these steps until battery takes a charge.

dewalt nicad 14.4v and 18v tested

infringer approved it works in some cases.

WARNING please use extreme caution when messing with batteries do not carry out any of these tests without proper knowledge and safety measures eye protection skin and face protection required and a fire extinguisher etc... are needed.

I refuse to accept responsibility for any injuries from your own tests.

Kator01

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Hi Mark,

please find attached the most simple and cheap system you can get.

Before you use this make sure that the cells are not leaking. By this I mean that there is salt appearing around the positive pole. Of course you have to crack open the casing ot the battery in order to check this.

But anyway you can use the circuit attached here. Depending on the total voltage of you NiCd-battery-stack you should use the correct AC voltage at the secondary of the transformer. which is always about 3 times higher than the DC-Level of your battery-stack.
In this case for a 12 V dc level you need 30 to 45 Volt AC at the secondary. You can use 30 V AC but then you need a lower resistor in relation to using 45 V which in this circuit is limiting the current supplied to the NiCd.

NiCd can be charged 2/3 of the tortal capacity. having a 900 mAh battery you can charge with 300 mA without the battery getting hot. Usually I however do not charge higher than 200 mA.
Keep in mind to choose the correct transformer ( secondary voltage and power) which must be adapted to the power supplied to the battery.

The diode can be a standard 1N4001,... 1N4007 and it supplies only one half wave ( positive part ) of the AC.
In this way you have a controlled pulsed current entering the battery and it removes any memory-efects for sure, I can guarantee this because I have applied this hundret of times.

There are three states of condition I found with older NiCd:

1) one or more cells are shorted. If you have 3 cells in series and the middle one is shorted you can still charge the other two. At the end of or even during the charging process you will see which one is dead. just measure the total voltage in dc mode of your meter while charging.

2) One or more cells have very high resistance. in this case no current will flow which you can check with your ampere-meter.

3) one ore more cells are low in capacity and voltage. This is the condition which can be repaired.

Of course all threeeconditions might occur in combination while you charge a stack of at least 3 cells.

it really fun to watch the dc-level slowly rising up beyon 1.2 V. it can reach 1.45 V for one cell.

What type of cells can you charge with this methode ? Almost any type of rechargeable cell with two exceptions :

Li-Ion-cell and Li-polymer-cells. these must be charged with contant current.

I even reconditioned old lead and lead-gel ( dry-cells). In this case this method is only used to re-condition the cell-structure ( desuphator-function) using 50 mA, applied with the same circuit but this time you can use your mains-outlet ( 120 AC, here in Europe 230 V ) and connect the hot wire to the diode. Instead of the variable resistor you use a 10 Watt incandescance-bulb which limits the current and if the cell is shorted will just fuction as if it is grounded. If the bulb is not on then you have high voltage at the positive terminal of your lead-battery which means the cell hast very high inner resistance. in this case you just wait 20 minutes an if the bulb does not light up disconnect the circuit by pulling out the plug and have a look inside the cell.
I usually crack the drycell open ( before I hook it up to the circuit ) and carefully refill some steam-destilled water in each cell as this is the first thing you have to check. Almost all cells I saved from the dump where really "dry" in the true sense. There is no maintainance-free lead-battery. Water is split and escapes throug the build-in silicon-caps.
After the cell is reconditioned is must have 12 to 13 V dc-level. Only then it makes sense to apply the normal power-dc-charge-process which fills it up again.
Now here comes a very important step after you have reconditioned and recharged the cell - and this is true for both types :

You have to power-discharge them  into a load ( 50 Watt 12 V bulb for lead-battery ) to almost emty half the capacity and then slowly continue discharge  with 1/10 of the capacity. You can go as low as 4.5 Volt with a dry-cell and almost down to 0.5 Volt with a NiCd. Following this you must immediatly charge up in the normal way.

My experience is that I had success only with 1/3 of all cells I tried to re-animate.

Good luck

Kator01





ramset

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Kator 01

Wow thanks ;D ;D

Chet
« Last Edit: January 02, 2010, 08:04:56 PM by ramset »

ramset

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Any one have any tips for alkaline batteries ??

I've heard these can be recharged?[just saw a thousand or so at the dump]

Thanks

Chet

Mark69

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Hey thanks all for the input,  I will give some of these a try.  It is a lithium ion battery.

Mark

Paul-R

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Try the circuit on page 21. It does some good to lead acid battys.
http://www.free-energy-info.co.uk/Chapter6.pdf

Judges

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Re: Reconditioning a cell phone battery? Is it possible to restore life span?
« Reply #10 on: February 01, 2010, 12:12:07 AM »
Reply #5 on: January 02, 2010, 06:35:09 PM »

Thanks,kator01,,,going to give this a try.
Batteries are costly and a nuisance,as,all my hand held equipment runs on them.
Joe.

infringer

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Re: Reconditioning a cell phone battery? Is it possible to restore life span?
« Reply #11 on: February 01, 2010, 01:41:50 AM »
http://r-charge.com/rc-1au.html

Professional reconditioning charger... Dunno if it operates on the same basis or not but anyhow just thought I would share as an alternative.



« Last Edit: February 01, 2010, 04:04:10 AM by infringer »

infringer

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Re: Reconditioning a cell phone battery? Is it possible to restore life span?
« Reply #12 on: February 01, 2010, 04:04:29 AM »
LiOn Revival guide: http://sodoityourself.com/reviving-laptop-batteries/

For Info purposes I will add a cut and paste in case the website does not last... Graphs and pics not included sorry.

Here is a way to revive your old battery pack. Usually the laptop battery is the first part to break. On older laptops a new battery pack can cost more than the PC itself, so buying a new one is no option.

I have had different results with different battery packs, but the usual is a 50-70 % increase in time running on batteries. My personal experience is that NiMh batteries are much easer to rejuvenate than LiIon.

There are no guarantees and you might end up destroying your Battery pack. It might even explode, so continue at your own risk.

Step 1 - Drain the battery

Remove the AC adapter and let it run until the battery is completly empty. You can turn off all power saving features to speed things up. When it goes in to sleep mode, try to turn it on until you get no response at all.

Step 2 - Drain the battery even more

Using a low wattage 12v lamp (car brake light for example), you can empty the battery pack even further. Check the voltage of your battery pack, and use a lamp with a suitable voltage. Remember not to use a lamp with too high wattage as this could damage your batteries.  Also, be careful not to short circuit. You will need to figure out where the ground and + voltage is. On this IBM thinkpad batterypack they are located on the opposite corners in the connector.

Connecting to battery using paper clips

Paperclips are ideal to connect the lamp to the battery connector.

Let the lamp shine until you see it going slightly dimmer. It is important not to drain it too much (especially Li-Ion).

Draining battery using lamp

 If you are the cautious type, you can hook up a multimeter and measure the voltage. I usually don’t like to bother, but you can calculate how much you can drain (Skip if if you don´t care that much):

For example if your battery has 9,6 Volts printed on it:

9,6 / 1,2 = 8 cells

8 x 0,6 = 4,8 V.

So, it’s safe to drain this 9,6 V pack to 4,8 V.

Step 3 - Recharge

Now it’s time for the for the fun part. I like to log just about everything to track the results. If you like that too, just download and run apmmowin before inserting the battery. The output can be redirected to a file like this:

apmmowin > cycle1.txt

Recharge to 100%, and repeat from Step 1.

 

Results

For this article i have used apmmowin to log the results. The graph below shows the increase in battery time from 50 minutes to 2 hours and 41 minutes:

Battery graph

These results are from four cycles with a  IBM Thinkpad R40 9.6 V Ni-Mh battery pack.

Before the discharge / Recharge cycles the battery time fell drastically from 60% to 10%. Afterwards the drop has dissapeared and the discharge rate is much more constant.