Electronic – Does any of those internet tips to recondition Li-ion batteries actually work

I think what they're trying to do here is 'trick' the phone's battery charging intelligences. Li-On batteries are very touchy and have somewhat complex charging strategies. It all boils down to determining something called State-Of-Charge (SOC). SOC is just a percentage in the end, but arriving at the SOC number relies on a large number of factors that are not always easy to read and sometimes must be indirectly inferred. For instance, let's assume that you have a cell phone with a Li-On battery that is 3.7V and 1000mAH. We'll start with it being fully charged, so we know SOC is 100%. As you use your device you're drawing current out of the battery and the battery's voltage will drop - eventually. By measuring the current and monitoring the voltage you can guess what the SOC is. One problem is that the voltage isn't terribly useful in determining SOC because it doesn't change very much until the battery is nearly empty - that is NOT something you want to do to a Li-On battery. So you're mainly relying on the current.

So your SOC is being estimated throughout the usage. It gets low - 50% maybe - so you plug it in to charge. While it's charging, it monitors the charge current and battery voltage to determine when SOC is 100% again. Only, due to errors in measurement it says that the charge is complete when SOC is actually only 95%. Now your phone thinks 95% is fully charged - and it remembers this for future reference because it doesn't want to over-charge the batteries (this is also very bad). So essentially it's trying to read when the battery is full by measuring what goes in and guessing where that puts the SOC based on past results.

The errors aren't large so during normal charge/discharge usage you won't notice a problem. But sometimes the errors can stack up and your phone thinks its fully charged when it has little or no charge - it goes straight from full to empty and due to the incorrect SOC calculation the phone won't try to charge the battery more because it doesn't want to damage it.

In these cases you have to reset the SOC state. I have a Droid Incredible 2 and I've done it by removing the battery and holding the power button for 30 seconds, then putting the battery in and charging the phone while its off. This always fixes the issue where the battery thinks its full but drops down to something like 10% very quickly and the issue where it thinks its at 10% but has much more charge left.

The strategy outlined in your post is obviously trying to recalibrate the SOC or trick the algorithm somehow. Having never developed a charger that relied on SOC I can't say whether it will work but it seems like a lot of effort for a questionable amount of benefit. If your battery is acting really funny try what I suggested first.

Among mainstream battery technologies, LiPo has the best energy density, so you will probably want to go this way. In your case, since you will use a regulator anyway, every configuration possible (including single cell combined with a step-up boost regulator). Once you have chosen the total energy capacity you need for your application and the cell configuration, there are two parameters to consider:

1. Quality: for the best specific energy, you will need to get high quality cells, which are going to cost more.
2. Discharge rating: cells are usually rated for a given maximum discharge current, usually expressed relatively to its capacity (for example, a 10C rating for a 1000mAh cell means that the max current is 10*1000mA = 10A). While higher C rating may mean a lower ESR, there is a trade-off and increasing C rating significantly lowers the specific energy. As an example, a 40C 2000mAh cell from a high quality chinese manufacturer I was looking at recently had a specific energy of about 140 Wh/kg while the 15C version had a specific energy of 170 Wh/kg. This difference can largely offset any loss due to slightly increased ESR.

Whatever configuration you will end up using, your require that the battery lasts at least 5h. Assuming little loss in DC-DC regulation, this means that the average current would be at most 0.2C and the peak current (from your numbers) about 0.6-1C. I would thus look for 5C-rated good-quality cells, which should get you 180Wh/kg or more.