If you have ever encountered a problem in your car when the battery just seemed to be unable to jump start your car? This happens most commonly in the winter and in the morning. After several trials, you finally get the car to start and then the next morning it behaves like it again. If your car battery was brand new or wasn’t used for a long time, this might seem weird. Actually, you have just experienced battery sulfation.
Inside a battery, voltage and capacitance is generated between metallic plates and a liquid solution where the plates are suspended. In most common lead acid batteries, the lead reacts with the sulfuric acid found in the electrolyte solution and forms lead sulfate. This reaction is called sulfation.
If your battery has remained unused or was kept in storage for a long time, there are very large chances that sulfation will occur. It’s very easy to detect if our battery is showing signs of this.
Whenever you use the battery, it reaches a certain voltage and then suddenly dies. If you try to find out what’s wrong, you will find it wasn’t generating enough current and it has virtually no capacity. So how does this happen?
The lead sulfate that has formed from the lead and the sulfuric acid is a kind of precipitate which slowly covers the metallic plates in crust. A precipitate is a kind of rust, which instead of eating away the metal it has formed on, just covers it entirely.
Nowadays, there are plenty of ways to reverse the effects of sulfation. There are available devices called battery desulfators which take away the lead sulfate rust off of the plates and makes your battery as good as new.
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