Battery / Accumulator / Cell (Glossary)

Batteries are electrochemical energy stores; chemically stored energy can be tapped from them as required in the form of electric current, thus making electricity portable in space and time. This process can be reversed in accumulators, i.e. this type of battery can be recharged, the input of current means that the current-supplying chemical processes run 'backwards'.

Other current stores include fuel cells or capacitors, whereby the so-called supercaps are increasingly filling the gap between the two technical principles.

With no current store, every current consumption would have to be 'online', every consumer would have to be connected to the current generator by a cable and the current would have to be generated at precisely the same moment it is needed. Torches, mobile phones or portable CD players would be just as impossible as pacemakers or satellite technology on the "dark" side of the earth. The wish for mobility is one of the most powerful development incentives of our times, so that today - around two hundred years after their invention - batteries are available for a variety of applications in wealth of different shapes and sizes.

Linguistic use: battery, accumulator, cell

In general linguistic use a differentiation is usually made between batteries (disposable energy carriers) and accumulators or accus (rechargeable systems). 'Battery' is often used as the generic term for both, leading to a certain linguistic uncertainty. In case of doubt it is thus best to use the correct names 'Primary battery' (disposable energy carrier) and 'Secondary battery' (rechargeable, regenerative system). Incidentally, this differentiation is also used for energy sources in general: primary energy sources are, for example, the 'exhaustible' crude oil and natural gas, whereas secondary energy sources are understood as meaning the 'reproductive' or 'renewable' energy sources such as wind power or rape seed oil.

A battery consists of one or more (electrical) cells. For technical reasons the Voltage of a single electrical cell can only be influenced in a very small way. It is normally between one and four volts. To achieve higher voltages (e.g. 12 or 24 volts for motor vehicles) a number of individual cells are switched in series. The word battery originally only meant the combination of several such cells in a row, though this linguistic differentiation is no longer common today. Since the "insides" of a battery are not normally visible, the word is used today for the housing unit, irrespective of whether it contains only one or several cells.

© Marc Stenzel

	See also:
		Glossary overview Why does a battery supply power? Historical development of the battery Battery-Packs Batteries for medical equipment

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Keywords: accumulator accumulators secondary cell cells rechargeable battery batteries