Adapting the Peukert Equation to Batteries Discharged at Pulse Currents

The remarkable increase in the production of battery-powered devices has greatly boosted research on batteries. Despite the many analytical and circuit models for batteries developed in recent years, one of the best-known models to describe the performance of a battery remains the mathematical expression defined by Wilhelm Peukert more than one century ago. However, this model has always been applied to the discharge of batteries at constant currents. Today, however, there are more and more applications in which batteries are used with pulse currents (e.g., wireless sensors, electric vehicles). This article presents a methodology for adapting the Peukert equation for pulse current discharged batteries. For validation, the extended application of Peukert’s law is adopted for an alkaline battery and a lithium-based battery. In this context, although the model parameters are firstly extracted from product data, some direct measurements are also reported for comparison. The absolute maximum error of the models for the batteries under test, with respect to the manufacturer’s data and experimental results, is always less than 2% in the case of discharging with pulse currents.