How does battery degradation work?

Question

Let’s say I have a smartphone or an electric car, it loses 10% of the capacity.

Does it mean that the system consumes 10% more power, or the capacity just lowered, making me spend less electricity/money to charge?

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

Atoms that are positively or negatively charged are called ions.

A battery stores energy be separating the positively and negatively charged ions. This is hard to do because these ions don’t want to be separated. Letting the electrons on the negatively charged ions go where they want to go is exact how the battery provides power.

During charge/discharge cycles, the barrier that keeps these ions separated will become damaged. A damaged barrier is less effective and keeping these ions separated which means fewer atoms are in a charged state and this results in lower capacity.