system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does physical trauma (shaking/vibration/dropping) have an influence on batteries and how long they hold their charge?

If I’m tossing my AA batteries around the house before I actually use them in something could I at all be shortening how long/well they can hold their charge?
gpt
Theoretically yes. A battery stores energy in the chemical bonds of the materials inside it. By moving and shaking them you could theoretically alter the properties of the chemical compounds. However, in most common AA batteries the materials are dense pastes that are tightly compacted in the steel can. Therefore, shaking them does not cause significant effect on the materials.

As an example, think of a thick liquid, for example, honey. If you shake a sealed bottle of honey vigorously for a few minutes, and then you stop, it will still be honey; it will not lose its properties or taste. You would have to use a powerful centrifuge in order to start splitting the sugars from the water contained in honey, and significantly alter its properties.

The paste that makes the AA batteries is even denser than honey, like dried up mud, and tightly packed. You would need very strong forces to alter significantly the chemical properties of the materials.

Now, lithium ion batteries, such as the ones in cellphones, are different. They don't have pastes, they have coatings in very thin copper and alumninium layers. Shaking them may actually rupture the layers, causing an internal short circuit. It is possible to damage them with enough force, but this isn't very common in the normal usage of the battery.

Battery cells of all kinds are actually tested in special shaking tables which move in all three axes (X, Y, Z) precisely to test their mechanical stability. There are international standards from ISO, IEC, IEEE, and others, which describe the characteristics of these tests. If the AA batteries and lithium-ion cells were not strong enough they would not have made it to the consumer market that we see today.