Wind Energy Components Series Part 2: Hub and Nacelle Explained

How to keep your smartphone battery charged

No one can deny that today, Digital solutions play a significant role in all our lives and daily activities, where everything becomes computerized. Browsing and mobile application usage, and watching videos can drain the mobile battery quickly.

One of the toughest challenges and the worst nightmare is to have an empty battery during an online meeting or while playing your best game. That could be imagined is the limited battery operation and lifetime.

Save the power of your mobile Battery

In previous articles, we discussed the energy storage system in general and went into some detail about the battery, what it is, how it works, and finally its applications. In this article, we will explore 2 main issues about mobile batteries.

The first one is how a battery’s lifespan is affected by the battery’s heavy use and the increase in charge/discharge cycles. The second issue will discuss and explain 15 ways to utilize the operation of your smartphone batteries to optimize the mobile battery’s power consumption and maximize its lifetime.

These ways were recommended and studied by experts, and the results have a significant impact on the batteries’ operation and lifetime. The effect of short operation time and short battery lifetime can result in a change of cost by replacing the batteries or buying a supportive power bank to be used in case of low charge of batteries.

So let us dive in and find out what causes the shortening of the mobile battery lifespan and the ways to have battery power saving and operate the battery as long as possible.

How do batteries' charge/discharge cycles affect their life span?

Easily, the more Battery charging and discharging cycles, the shorter the battery life span, whereas the charge/discharge cycles increase the degradation of the battery’s capacity and life span. Each discharge/charge cycle harms the battery life span because it directly affects the battery’s main parameters that degrade the battery physically.

Modern mobile phones have a built-in charge control that includes a PID controller to monitor and control the charging process, where, based on the percentage of charging, it controls the amps delivered to the battery.

It enables the maximum charging current at a low charging percentage and decreases the charging current at a high charging percentage. But the extreme charge/discharge of the mobile battery can affect the following parameters:

• Regarding the entire chemical reaction of mobile phone batteries, some unwanted materials accumulate as a result of these chemical reactions. These materials increase with each charging/discharging cycle and can cause internal short circuits and finally lead to decreased battery capacity and reduced lifespan.
• Capacity Decreasing, where the ability of the batteries to deliver and keep their charges decays over time. This natural degradation process is normal during the charge/discharge and happens in all types of batteries.
• (DOD) Depth of Discharge refers to how much capacity of the battery is consumed during each cycle. Normally, a low DOD value affects a minority of the battery’s life, which is better than a high value of DOD, which may put more stress on the battery.
• Heat Generation is where the heat is generated inside the battery because of the chemical reaction during the charge/discharge process. The amount of heat produced increases with the increase in charge/discharge numbers. This leads to the internal components' degradation. More heat leads to the condition where the battery overheats and becomes unstable.

What are the ways that save the battery’s power for your mobile phone?

1. Adjust the screen brightness manually to a suitable setting and avoid high brightness. Try to reduce it.
2. Optimize the smartphone charging levels by keeping it at a level between 20% and 80%. Start charging the mobile at 20% and stop it at 80% to avoid extreme charging/discharging. Do not discharge below 20% and do not charge more than 80%. Exceeding these values affects the degradation of the battery and, as a result, the battery performance.
3. Adjust the setting of the screen timeout feature to be as short as possible. This will decrease the usage of the display lighting load that consumes power from the phone battery.
4. Enable dark backgrounds or themes as darker backgrounds consume less power on OLED smartphone screens.
5. Make a limitation for unnecessary application notifications by turning off all notifications related to unnecessary applications and keeping only the essential application notifications.
6. Utilize the use of Wi-Fi instead of mobile data where using the Wi-Fi network is more saver than the use of mobile data. So, connect to Wi-Fi networks, if possible, to reduce battery drain caused by cellular phone data.
7. Allow the power saving mode for the battery, which utilizes the internal battery as much as possible, seeking the optimization of battery operation.
8. Keep your device away from extreme cold or hot conditions. Very high temperature that is measured by temperature sensors damage the batteries, and very cold decreases the performance of the cell phone device.
9. Put limitations on the background application refresh of its content. This refresh of the applications’ content drains the batteries quickly. Allow only the necessary ones.
10. Turn off all services related to locations. Disable GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth as long as you don’t need them. Turn them on manually when you tend to use one or more of them. These features will drain the battery quickly, especially when searching for signals.
11. Turn off vibrate mode if not necessary for calls and notifications, as it consumes power more than ringtones.
12. Minimize the use of animations and live wallpapers as they drain the battery faster.
13. Turn off any unnecessary sounds and reduce the sound volume levels. It consumes heavy power.
14. Turn off all unwanted connectivity features like mobile hotspots, NFC, and tethering if they are not necessary.
15. Keep your smartphone software updated at all times as it may have battery performance optimization features.

Conclusion

Increasing the charge/discharge process of the mobile battery will significantly affect negatively its life span by making it shorter. Also, there are many recommended ways to be done to help in increasing the operation time of the mobile battery to avoid losing its charge quickly.

It should be highlighted that these tips depend on the type and model of the phone. And its operating system. Finally, feel free to comment and share to maximize the benefits of the information mentioned in the article and help mobile phone users enhance their mobile batteries.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is it bad to charge a smartphone battery to 100%?

Modern smartphones can safely charge to 100%, but keeping the battery between 20% and 80% may help reduce long-term battery degradation and extend its lifespan.

2. Why does my phone battery drain so quickly?

High screen brightness, background applications, GPS, mobile data, Bluetooth, live wallpapers, and frequent notifications are some of the most common causes of rapid battery drain.

3. Does using Wi-Fi save battery compared to mobile data?

In most cases, yes. Wi-Fi connections generally consume less power than mobile data, especially in areas with weak cellular signal strength where the phone continuously searches for a better connection.

4. What is the biggest factor that affects smartphone battery lifespan?

Repeated charge and discharge cycles, excessive heat, deep battery discharges, and frequent charging to very high levels can accelerate battery aging and reduce its overall capacity over time.