If I charge a battery using a much higher current, can it explode? If I have a 12V 4Ah lead acid battery and use a battery charger that, let's say for example, can charge 10A, 50A, or 100A. If I theoretically turned it to 100A will the battery explode?
I understand that when you use a higher current the battery will charge quickly but due to resistance and flow of ions a lot more heat will be generated, so will this heat cause an explosion..or perhaps just a bursting of that battery spewing boiling acid?
And no I am not trying this in real life..I just recall seeing the scene in the Amazing Spider-Man 2 when Parker is trying to build his web shooters to be able to resist large amounts of electricity yet they keep exploding.
 A: Maybe it is worth bringing a comment into an answer:
Batteries have protective circuits.

The most basic safety device in a battery is a fuse that opens on high current. Some fuses open permanently and render the battery useless; others are more forgiving and reset. The positive thermal coefficient (PTC) is such a re-settable device that creates high resistance on excess current and reverts back to the low ON position when the condition normalizes.

So modern batteries are self protected from strong currents.
Here is a video though, which someone made by removing the protective circuits and using high charging currents on lithium batteries.

Uploaded on Aug 15, 2010
Two lithium ion batteries exploding due to overcharging. This isn't to show that lithium batteries are unsafe. I just got bored and decided to blow up a couple cells from an unused battery I had lying around by removing their circuit protection. Explosions are a lot of fun.

And here is an advertising video for safe sheds for charging lead acid batteries, and yes, they do explode when overcharged.
A: Supposing that the charger gives the voltage greater than 12 V (say, 15 V), we can estimate 15 V × 100 A = 1500 W, a power of a small electric kettle. It is insufficient to effect an actual explosion quickly, but the battery will possibly immediately start to spew the acid mixed with hydrogen bubbles (note that hydrogen is flammable).
Another question in: would the charger really generate 100 A in this situation? The small lead acid battery certainly has a higher internal resistance than a bigger one, for which charging at 100 A may be desirable. The charger might have some current stabilizer, but if it is a specialized 12 V battery charger, then its designers were aware that it isn’t helpful to apply, say, 28 V to such a battery. Probably, there is a transformer and a rectifier inside, and when you connect the transformer to the mains (that have a fixed AC voltage), the output has some definite maximal voltage. Even if there is a switched-mode power supply that is technically capable to raise the voltage beyond reasonable values, it won’t necessarily do it. So, in a plausible scenario the  current through the battery will be constrained by its resistance and the power input will be much less than 1500 W.
