According to estimates, nearly 15 billion batteries are produced and sold worldwide annually. Most of these end up in landfills and some are salvaged for valuable metals while the small amount of energy left in them goes to waste. This, despite the fact that about half of them contain as much as 50% energy.
To try to recover the remainder energy, the Taiwanese team tested a method called “self-adaptive pulse discharge” (SAPD) that can be used to determine the optimal values of two key parameters – pulse frequency and duty cycle – that determine the discharge current from the discarded batteries. A high discharge current amounts to a high amount of recovered energy.
“Draining small remaining energy from household batteries is a starting point for waste reduction, and the proposed energy recovery method serves as an effective tool to reutilize a large number of discarded…
Not just metals – Energy can also be recovered from discarded batteries
