Battery Peak Current

[vission]

I have a question about standard batteries. If I know the internal resistance of the battery and the nominal voltage, can I calculate the possible peak current? I understand that as I draw more from the battery the voltage will drop along with the current.

I am mostly interested in the total possible current delivered if a worse case type scenario takes place, such as a dead short someplace in the circuit. For whatever the reason of the short, what type of current can I expect to see with new/fully charged batteries?

I am assuming that different chemistry batteries will have different peak current flows based on how fast they can react and discharge. But I was hopping that knowing the internal resistance and the nominal voltage, I could come close to calculating a reasonable value across all batteries.

Thanks.

 

[crutschow]

Yes, the initial peak short-circuit current from a battery can equal the nominal voltage divided by the internal resistance. This can be rather high, even for some types of small batteries and has been know to cause some batteries to explode from the heat generated by this internal resistance.

 

[Diver300]

Batteries vary enormously. Even within the same chemistry, the physical size of a cell has a large effect on the internal resistance and therefore the short circuit current.

I guess that I have worked with batteries with 10,000 times the short circuit circuit current of other batteries I've used.