GPZ500 No Spark!

Those batteries were ones that the plates hadn't sulphated. As long as
a lead acid battery plates are still OK it will indeed draw a lot of charge
current if it is low on charge.

Batteries that are low on acid are ones that the plates have partially
sulphated. Once the plates sulphate it's difficult to impossible to get
the crystals to dissolve back into the water in the battery and if the
plates sulphate the battery will not take much charge current, unless
you jazz up the voltage to many times a safe level (in which case the
higher charge current won't necessairly force the sulpher back into
solution,
it will just be disappated as heat)

Old-timey batteries like our friend probably had in his air-force shop
had solid lead plates - with this type of battery it is possible to tear it
apart, scrub off the lead sulphate, put it back together and put in
fresh electrolyte and get it going again. With these batteries once
they were fully charged, additional charge current would start boiling
the electrolyte, which would increase acid concentration and thus
require constant watching, and adding water as the electrolyte went
down. These also could be reawakened by the addition of fresh
acid if the plates were partially sulphated, along with funny charge
currents and voltages.

Modern lead acid batteries use lead plates that are more like sponges,
plus their electrolyte isn't just plain old sulpheric acid, it has some
other
stabilizer chemicals in it to try to force the electrolyte to never boil,
so that you never need to add water (maintainence free) as well as
to try to prevent sulphation (if the battery sits for a long time never
charged) The different plate composition gives them the ability to
dump -much higher- current with -much smaller- plate area, which is
important if your a consumer
who never checks his battery electrolyte level, trying to start a car in
Minnesota at -20F temperatures, where the designer has been in a space
crunch on how much space he can allocate to the battery compartment.

With this type of battery, once the plates sulphate they fundamentally
change composition, it is not possible to "re-spongify" them, you may
be able to get some of the visible sulphation to go away, but the battery
capacity will be permanently ruined. Adding electrolyte is a big no-no
because it ruins the electrolyte chemistry and causes the other chemicals
to stop working because the acid is out of balance now.

If it has been flat for any length of time, like longer than a few weeks,
it is ruined. Replace it. It does not take a lot of time for lead acid
battery plates to sulphate once they are discharged. As long as the
battery is maintained at full charge, the plates won't sulphate. (at least,
not that fast)

Well, yes. The electrical formulas dictate that once the bike alternator is
producing power, that -if- the auto system presents a -lower- resistance
to the motorcycle alternator than the bike system, then power will flow
from the motorcycle alternator to the car system.

If the car battery is -very- discharged, YET is still a "good" battery
meaning
it has not sulphated yet, meaning that it has a low internal resistance and
will
thus take a high charge current, and the motorcycle battery is a "bad"
battery
meaning that it has completely sulphated and thus has a high internal
resistance
and thus will not take a high charge current, then power will indeed flow
from
the battery to the car.

But it is pretty difficult to get a situation in a car where the car battery
is very
discharged YET is still NOT sulphated, and thus has a low internal
resistance.
If you turn on your headlights for 4 hours and draw the car battery down to
nothing, then jump start the car, well then for the next 20 minutes or so
you will
have that situation. Or if your car engine is a big piece of shit and
requires
15 minutes of cranking over with the starter to get it fired up, well then
once it's
running then immediately after that yes you will have that situation. I
think
though that it would be unlikely that once someone jump started a car that
they would immediately turn around and try jumping some other vehicle from
that car. Same if their car engine was a POS. So I think those scenarios
are
much more contrived than anything else.

Ted

 

The only zero frequency DC I know of offhand is static electricity and
DC from a battery.

Any rotating device that uses copper windings wrapped around pole shoes
that pass through a magnetic field is going to have a frequency
depending upon the number of
pole shoes and the RPM.

A DC generator puts out AC current that is "rectified" through brushes
and a commutator, selecting the positive alternation of the armature's
output. This produces rippling DC which an oscilloscope would show as
only the positive halves of the sine wave above the zero line.

An AC alternator produces AC current that is rectified through a three
phase full wave rectifier bridge made of six diodes. This also produces
rippling DC which an oscilloscope would show as only the positive
halves of the sine wave above the zero line.

The peaks of the positive halves of the sine wave are so brief that
engineers don't rate their device by the peaks. They have a calculation
called "root mean square" that
shows the usable part of the alternation to be 0.707 times the peak.

If you have a solid state device that produces AC current by running an
oscillator circuit that feeds AC into a rectifier, you may be
interested in produce a DC with as little ripple as possible, because
it makes an annoying buzzing sound in audio outputs.

Solid state power supplies will have large coils to slow the passage of
current and a bunch of capacitors to absorb voltage surges in order to
smooth out the DC output.

The ripple effect of DC current from an automotive alternator is
reduced by the battery's ability to absorb and block the highest
momentary voltages.

 

Don't be silly. Automotive and aviation batteries all have spongy lead
plates in order to maximize the area of contact with the electrolyte,
thereby reducing their physical size.

A battery composed of solid plates that could start a car engine would
be bigger than the engine itself. A solid plate battery capable of
starting a J-33 engine in an Air Force jet trainer would be so large it
wouldn't fit in the whole nose of the aircraft.

A solid plate battery in an Apollo capsule would have weighed more than
the three crew members combined.

No, when we filled the rebuilt batteries with electrolyte, some of it
would be absorbed ito the plates and some would be boiled away during
the charging process. So I had to top up fully charged batteries with
more electrolyte before putting the caps on and setting them on the
outgoing racks.

My GSXR shop manual advises mechanics to top up new batteries with
electrolyte, not water, after they are done with their initial charge.

Owner's manuals will tell the rider to only add distilled water, never
acid, to their battery. They never say anything about adding
electrolyte. That's probably for produst liability, since some
do-it-yourselfer might try to mix water into sulfuric acid and get
splattered by it.

Electolyte is mixed the other way, the acid is slowly stirred into the
water by an experienced person wearing rubber gloves, a face shield and
a rubber apron.

Cheezus H. Kee-rist! The first old automotive battery I ever took apart
to see how it worked was half a century ago, and it was a spongy lead
battery. If it had been a solid plate battery, I would have needed a
fork lift to carry it home.

My disappointment was that the plates were not made of solid lead, so I
couldn't sell it for scrap as I thought I could do.

 

Actually, I remember a 1970s Cossack owner's manual that told owners, in
the absence of distilled water (probably the usual state of affairs in
Communist Russia), that it was permissible to use melted snow.

"But not from a tin roof"

Honest.

 

It just depends on the number of plates and how they are connected
together. You could easily build a battery with manageable weight and size
by just putting a lot more plates in it, making them thinner, and connecting
them
in parallel.

The local battery dealer I purchase batteries from has a few old-timey
wet cell batteries in his display case that use glass jars and ceramic tops
and they are definitely constructed with solid lead plates.

I think I thought you were older than you really are, though.

You cannot boil away the chemicals in the electrolyte, only the water.

All of the motorcycle wet cells that I've bought that came with a separate
plastic bottle with premixed electrolyte had instruction manuals that said
the same thing, but only after the initial charge, if the level had gone
down.
They seem to put a little extra electrolyte in the bottle for this reason.

Years ago I worked one summer in a hot tank galvanizing plant, dipping large
steel beams into molten zinc. The plant had a large heated sulphuric acid
tank
that you would dip the steel beams into and let them sit in it until all the
rust
had been eaten off the beams, then you would raise the beams, move them
to a water tank, dip them in that, then raise them again and move them to
a flux tank, dip them in that, then raise them and dip them into the zinc.

There was an old fart that worked there who had worked at galvanizing
operations for years, and he used to dip up a little sulphuric acid and
clean out his pipe with it every once in a while. Quite a character.

The acid tank was a real riot though, everthing around it, steel, concrete,
you name it, was eaten away from the acid fumes. One time the overhead
sprinker system broke and dumped a thousand gallons of water down on
the zinc tank over the weekend because of fumes from that tank eating
up the sprinker pipes. (the damn fool building codes mandated a sprinker
system in a building that was only steel and concrete and contained no wood
or anything burnable, with a 800 degree molten zinc tank in it if you can
believe it) When they built that building they started out with overhead
electric
cranes and the acid fumes ate up the conductors, so the cranes would stop
working right over the acid tank. Later on they used compressed air cranes
and the acid fumes ate up the steel channel the cranes traveled in so the
cranes
would stick and be hard to pull along the channel.

Of course, if they lost a part in the acid tank, and didn't manage to fish
it out
pretty quickly, it disappeared. Parts lost in the zinc tank didn't do this,
but
over time they would get soft and deform.

When we dipped parts in the tank we would hide behind a shield, and
you would see the tank spattering molten zinc all over the place. If a part
had a void in it that the water didn't properly drain from, every once in a
while
you would get a steam explosion in the zinc tank and a fountain of molten
zinc would erupt from the submerged part in the tank.

You could have melted them down and poured yourself some ingots I
suppose. Of course these days you can get as much lead as you want
just go to a tire place and they have buckets of old lead weights. The
cost to haul it is more than the value of the lead, and they aren't allowed
to toss it into the trash since it's haz mat. Fishermen and Black Powder
hobbysts often get lead this way.

There is an interesting story in the biography of Thomas Edison. One day
when he was a young 20 something pup, he came across a stack of used
up Gould batteries that were being just thrown away from the telegraph
company. The telegraph company didn't realize that the batteries contained
platiinum anodes, but Edison did, and he carted off all of the batteries and
removed the platinum from them. Rather than selling it, Edison saved it
for his own use and later on for the use of his company Edison Labs. That
stash ended up lasting him for the rest of his life, and saved him untold
thousands of dollars years later.

Ted

 

We aren't into designing and building batteries here, we're trying to
educate less knowledgeable motorcyclists about the care and feeding of
the humble plastic cube directly below their ass.

We had a large glass cell 240 volt station battery to supply emergency
power to a large bulk power receiving station where I worked. We got
power at 500KV and 230KV and transformed it down to 34.5 KV. Since my
duties did not involve servicing the batteries, I only looked into the
battery room about twice in all the time I worked there. Each glass
cell was as big as a 2-drawer filing cabinet.

Another operator was asking the battery guy about why the electrolyte
in the cells had a lower specific gravity. The battery dude replied
that stationary batteries had some much plate area they didn't need a
stronger electrolyte mix.

I'm older than a Baby Boomer, but that doesn't make me senile.