Simple question regarding the Ah rating of a battery

[motivehunter]

Hi all!

Excuse the simple nature of this question, but I'm a mechanical engineer working on building his own PAS bicycle and need to understand this to go ahead with my work.

I understand that a 12V 7.2 Ah battery ideally discharges 7.2 ampere of current at a nominal voltage of 12V for 1 hour. But in reality, it is only capable of doing this for 45 minutes.

So am I correct in assuming that as the battery is an SLA (sealed lead-acid), if the application demands 20A, it will deliver the current at nominal voltage for 16.2 minutes? I mean, is this relationship linear?

Thanks in advance!

 

[NascentOxygen]

The concept of ampere-hours does lead you to expect that. But in practice, the heavier the current, the less realistic that is. From a 7.2AH battery you may get only 6 to 10 minutes at 20A before the voltage sags too low to be useful.

 

[motivehunter]

Thank you so much!

 

[Dundeephysics]

In theory its linear yes, again just like NascentOxygen said it will drop too much after 10 minutes which makes it useless. If the manufacturer says it discharges that in 1 hour in practice you need to consider less than that, probably even less than 45 mins. It also depends on the battery's age.