What is the maximum amount of power a AA battery can generate in optimal conditions?

it is possible, it is all in the gearing, although it can lift a man, it would be very slow.

With everything there is a trade off of power and speed, if you add to one side, you have to take away from the other side. i.e. more power, less speed, etc.

Without getting into battery chemistry, Peukert’s Equation, and a whole bunch of other things like that, lets say that I would put this under the, “Just because you can doesn’t mean it’s a good idea” category.

Not only is @DrBill correct that it would require seriously trading speed for force (not power; he used the wrong term there), when you combine the force and distance (the Work done) and the mechanical and electrical losses (resistance, friction…) you will not really have all that much. Even the best Lithium AA battery only contains 4 Watt-hours, most NiMHs and Alkalines around 3, and asking an alkaline to do it will drain it quickly enough to reduce it’s effective capacity to far less than that.

A AA battery can put out enough to really fuck me up if it feeds into a capacitor for a few minutes. At the photo lab we used to rip apart the disposable cameras that came in for the AA batteries in them. This was before iPods and we all had Diskman that used AA.

One night I was breaking apart some cameras in the 10+ bins we had of single use cameras to salvage the batteries from them.

I touched a capacitor that was used to power the flash and was knocked on my ass. So if you release all the juice in a AA in a split second it is a a scary amount of electricity. But it only lasts long enough to damage my arms for 30 minutes. Not joking. It is worse then a jolt from a electrical outlet.

@johnpowell Batteries don’t discharge that fast though; that is why capacitors are needed for things like flashes. And while a human can easily be killed by a few milli-amps, a device powerful enough to move a person will draw far more, and do so for longer than the milliseconds it took to knock you on your ass.

However, as the OP may need to work with similar circuitry in order to power a device, your tale is a good warning.

A typical AA alkaline battery can deliver nominally 1.5 V with a capacity of 2 to 3 Amp-hrs. For this example let’s call it 3 Amp – hrs. Amps x Volts = Watts so the battery will deliver 4.5 Watt-hrs or 16.2 KJ.
How much energy or work is that? Let’s convert to English units for you. =11948 ft-lbs
Assume a person weighs 150 pounds. That comes to 79.6 feet. But the mechanism will not be 100%efficiency so figure at best 50% with all the conversions So the device will lift a person 40 feet. How long will it take? Figure a safe discharge rate of 1.5 amps so it will take 2 hours. That is 0.006 horsepower or 4.5 watts. Note: I said SAFE discharge rate. You can make it go faster for a short time but the battery would be stressed – a dangerous condition.

Summary:
With a AA alkaline battery you can lift a 150 pound person 40 ft in 2 hours, with a 4.5 Watt DC motor and correct gearing. You can do this one time per battery.

@LuckyGuy Excellent analysis!

@dabbler Thank you. It’s my job.

You will get the most work out of AA Alkaline batteries if you keep the discharge rate to 0.5 amps, (0.75 Watts). If you follow that rule your lift will move at 5 ft /hour. At 10 ft / hour (~1 amp) you will need a special holder as the standard spring and plastic units will get soft and overheat. At 20 ft/hr you will need some form of external cooling. In all cases, using existing alkaline technology, you will be limited to 40 ft of lift. The laws of physics are hard to beat. Obviously if the person weighs less, the lift will go proportionately higher.

Haha, Originally I meant ‘lift more weight that a person could lift’ But, it doesn’t really matter at this point. Great answers. I was looking for a ballpark, @LuckyGuy exceeded my expectations. It is amazing to me now, to realize how much power is in a little battery.

@Afos22 You wrote: “It is amazing to me now, to realize how much power is in a little battery.”

What I find even more amazing is that for the same mass, gasoline has 40X the energy storage of an Alkaline battery. No wonder gasoline/hydrocarbon fuel/oil has been around for such a long time.