For anyone that doesn’t know, and I hope I’m not relaying incorrect information, a regular voltaic battery like a Duracell or Energizer has a negatively charged end where electricity flows through the device it’s being used for, powering the device, before completing its circuit to the positively charged end and the charges cancelling out/neutralizing. The battery is dead when the there’s little to no charge difference between the cells.
When batteries are stacked end-to-end in like a flashlight, won’t the negatively charged ends in the middle flow through the positive end of the next battery? Why aren’t they more quickly neutralized then?
In: Physics
Imagine if you put three pumps in series, up a hill. All the pumps are only strong enough to lift water 10 feet. The first pump pulls water from the pond and pumps it up 10 meters, where it feeds the second pump, which pumps it up to the third pump, which fills the barrel at the top of the hill, 30 feet higher.
Can you see how each pump does the same work?
This is the situation with batteries in series. Each one pushes the current through them ‘uphill’, with more energy, more pressure, then the next one adds more pressure, until you get to the top of the stack, where you have enough pressure to run your device.
So the bottom battery has its negative at 0v, and the positive at 1.5. The negative of the second cell is attached here, so is at 1.5 too – so the positive will be 1.5 volts higher at 3.0 volts. This is where the the third battery sits, with its negative at 3 volts, and the positive at 4.5. Each battery is in the same condition – with it’s positive end 1.5 volts higher than its negative end. Each battery does the same work – pulling the same current that is flowing through the whole stack and adding 1.5 volts worth of energy to it.
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