General Information

The author and a co-inventor published earlier an ergonomic and low-cost alternative battery technology in a bid to tackle batteries’ long-standing conundrums of slow charging and costly charging infrastructures. The technology adopts modularization of battery systems and prioritization of the charging/discharging of battery module(s) according to users’ human effort to unload/(re)load individual battery module(s), enabling users to unload preferentially, substantially discharged battery module(s) individually for (re)charging them with the domestic mains supply before reloading them instead of (re)charging the whole battery system in situ. As the charging speed is irrelevant to domestic charging, for example, at home overnight, which also avoids specialized charging infrastructures, the two conundrums above can no longer be concerns. However, this technology is confronted with a trade-off of users’ human effort between unloading/reloading many small battery modules and unloading/reloading fewer larger and heavier battery modules. This paper models this trade-off for the ultimate goal of optimization.