Can a Button Cell be Used in Place of an AA Battery?

Button style battery cells come in many shapes and sizes. Replacing a AA battery with a button cell battery is like replacing a gallon of milk with a half pint.

Advantages to Button Cell Batteries

Button cell batteries are ideal for extremely small and light weight applications like wrist watches, hearing aid, and calculators.

Physical Properties

Although the AA battery's physical size is standard, button batteries can come in many different shapes and sizes. Button batteries commonly found are quite a bit smaller than AA batteries. Adapting a button battery to a compartment designed for AA batteries could be challenging.

Electrical Properties

Cell voltage from one battery technology to another is consistent enough to accommodate interchanging one battery technology with another, within the same battery size. For example, all AA size nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride, or alkaline batteries are fully interchangeable, no problem.

If you begin stacking button cells to make up a AA battery, you also stack the cell voltages. Avoid excessive battery voltage as this will certainly destroy your device. Connecting the button cells in parallel would increase the battery capacity without adding the individual cell voltages, but this configuration is not practical if you are trying to approximate a AA battery.