Lithium Ion Battery Life Enhancement

Wondering what the best practices are for charging? If your device is powered by lithium-ion batteries follow these simple steps to get maximum battery life.
New Lithium Ion 

1. Always charge a new battery to 100% right after unboxing your device!

2. Let your fully charged drive drain the battery to a low state 5-15%

3. Charge to full again to accomplish the first deep full cycle formatting charge

The first 3 steps wake up the cell chemistry. Your device was shipped with a battery that is partially charged. Lithium ion batteries store better partially charged at ~30-40% charge. Manufacturers of devices send them with a partially charged battery to enhance the life of the product, especially given that many products contain a sealed non-user serviceable battery.

Long Life Mode 

Keep the battery 30-80% charged : partially charging helps to enhance battery life for lithium ion batteries by avoiding the damage modes causes by overcharging and deep discharging.

Outlet Timer + Device Charger for 1-2 hours While Sleeping 

You can plug your phone charging brick into an outlet time set to turn on for 1 hours then back off again so that you can still plug your phone in while you are sleeping, the cycle timer will turn on the charger and then turn it back off again while you are sleeping. This keeps the charger from overcharging your device, as overcharging increases the risk of a fire and greatly shortens the life of the battery.

Short Charging Sessions 

Charge your stuff & set a reminder using Siri, Google Now, Cortana or any other timer device. I recommend charging for 30 minutes to 1 hours at a time in the morning or evening. Be very careful with your charging port. Avoid cable tension as this can damage the charging port. Micro-usb ports on many devices are very fragile and easy to bend or break if you apply any forces to the charging cable while charging your device.

Heat Kills Lithium Ion 

Avoid Heat as heat damages the battery, especially above 77 deg F (25 deg C) : above 122 deg F ( 50 deg C ) causes rapid chemical physical entropy accelerating breakdown swelling bending damage that becomes visible obvious near the battery cells end of life with puffed up lithium polymer batteries common in smartphones, tablets and newer laptops.

100% Charging Shortens Battery Life 

Avoid 100% Charging. Over hundreds of cycle the repeated 100% charging regime will greatly accelerate the loss of battery capacity. The battery would lose capacity over time from again, but 100% charging and leaving your device plugged in for many hours will cause the battery to degrade faster.

Other Things to Avoid 

Avoid bending the battery or damaging the ends where the BMS is often contained. Do not puncture, twist or flex the battery. Avoid exposing the battery to water or other conductive fluids, especially strong acids, salt water, corrosive fluids or fluids in general.

Think About It, keep an eye on it! 

Look at the % Charge, Turn on Battery Percentage Readout in your device settings! Consider charging your stuff on a non-flammable surface like concrete or tile, away from gas cans, propane tanks, fossil fueled vehicles etc.

Over Charging Common & Manufactures Don't Care That it Makes Your Device Fail Sooner 
Notice the instruction that came with your device often never say anything about the 30-80% long life safety charging mode ? The number 1 reason that people upgrade mobile electronic devices with sealed batteries ? Weak battery performance. That gives manufacturers a reason to poorly design the charging system to gently progressively break down the battery!

Charging Fires 

Lithium ion battery fires are usually associated with leaving devices plugged into their charging adapters too much, too often, for too many hours per day. Leakage current from the charger will drive the cell voltage right up to 4.35vdc in many phones, when a prudent engineer would never charge a lithium ion battery of that kind beyond 4.11 vdc. Properly designed lithium electric battery powered systems float the cell at 3.82 vdc, and never fully charge beyond 4.20 vdc. Going beyond 4.2 vdc will shorten the lithium-ion's battery life.

Satellite & Hybrid Vehicle Batteries 

Notice a good example of battery cycle charging can be observed in aerospace space satellite energy storage system & the traction battery management in hybrid electric vehicles, noteworthy the hybrids from Toyota that keep the battery constantly partially charged! Shallow cycling between 30-80% enhances the battery life of battery energy systems based on Lithium Ion and Nickel Metal Hydride or NiMH.

Smartphone Charge Display 

% Battery Meter in the upper corner of your smartphone screen often displays a graphical image of the state of charge along with a two digit percentage display : in the phone settings a sub-menu to Battery often displays detailed information about the battery, charging and discharging rates with graphics and information related to which apps are draining the battery.

Smartphone GPS 

On of the fastest ways to destroy the battery in smartphone comes from using it as a GPS. When operating as a GPS the screen is often on high power consumption full output with the graphics processor running hot to display the 3D graphical map date while the CPU and network cards & GPS system are all running at higher rates that increase the drain on the battery. All this heavy processing heats up the phones thin fanless computer designs. When in direct sun the thermal loading from the sunlight entering the car windows hits the GPS mode phone, heating it to 150 deg F + ( 65.5 C ), damaging the battery with high heat. When plugged into a 12v USB cheap charge adapter the charging circuit drives the battery to full, generating heat with the charging process. Together the heat from the phones components combine with sun thermal load to literally cook the battery. The lithium ion battery of today fade quickly and wear out faster when regularly loaded with high heat levels. When used at a GPS the processing power, high display brightness, constant on screen, full chipset acceleration and fanless computer components means a lot of heat loads on the battery.

Gaming on Smartphone Juices the Battery Faster 

The 3D high end mobile games of today cause the phones GPU system to operate at high power levels along with the constant on while use the game screen power loads are higher than normal, the CPU is busy churing code, this puts huge electrical demands on the battery while the waste heat in the components applies thermal loading heat to the battery. Charging adds in even more heat, so you can really heat up your phone playing games while it is plugged in. Stockfish the chessgame for on my iPhone SE makes the phone heat up a lot during the course of a 5 min match against the chess engine. Playing the chess game drains the battery really quickly.

3D VR Headset Power Hungry 

Another fast way to zap your phone battery to a low state occurs when you use it in a 3D VR viewer. The gaming processing and thermal loads associated with the VR use are worse the mobile gaming in terms of battery drain. The 3D VR process thread are super intense for the phone hardware, generating lots of heat and draining the battery extra fast.

Fast Charging Cooks the Battery Faster 

Known as chemical degradation of the cell chemistry, the heat from fast charging accelerate the breakdown of lithium cobalt carbon battery common in nearly all smartphones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches & other portable electronics, some electric vehicles, industrial equipment, commercial tools and more. Use shorter charging cycles on slower chargers to reduce thermal damage to your fragile failure prone lithium ion powered things. Lower heat means less entropy in your device. Cooling is the friend of electronics and digital things. Heat is the enemy of electronics and digital things. Thermal control can be seen with elaborate heat sink designs in computers of many kinds. Brushless low noise low power DC fans dominate cooling designs in most stationary computers and laptops. Fanless computer are also common, using passive heat management with large metal heatsinks, heat pipes, thermally conductive films, foils, tapes, extrusions, parts, bonded thermally with thermally conductive adhesives and other wild techniques to move heat around.

NASA spacesuits, space tools, the International Space Station & More 
Lithium-ion 18650 cells are extensively used in aerospace application. They are procured from suppliers and then go through extensive quality control analysis to screen out "bad" cells. In the pack designs special efforts go to keeping the cells from freezing, overheating, shorting out & thermal runaway using a combination of intracell fuses that disconnect a failing cell from the rest of the batteries in the pack. Polymer flame suppression materials help to turn a flame output into just smoke to be vented through a special chimney out of the craft. The BMS or battery management system helps to keep the cells safe from overcharging, over discharging, short circuiting, venting with flame or failing catastrophically. The engineering is aimed at created a critical failure rather than a catastrophic failure. Having the pack fail in a predictable engineered ways means the failure can be controlled and a venting with flame event from thermal runaway can be converted to a vented smoke event of lower intensity, improving safety for the crew, craft & equipment.