bestsystem
Newly Enlightened
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2011
- Messages
- 61
Under what condition would cause Lithium polymer cell manufactured by such a reputable company to explode?
Nuff said. [emoji106]Under the condition that the separator failed, despite quality engineering and best efforts at flawless manufacturing?
I don't think they really know what it was, but something was probably physically wrong with the batteries. Or the charge circuitry, perhaps, but I doubt that. Cathode and anode weren't separated at some point, and foomp! Did they ever really "explode"? All I saw photos looked like fire damage. There's nothing in a LiPo or phone to really contain pressurized gas, and the battery materials can only burn so fast.
I don't know if the Note 7 had particularly fast charging, but that seems like a risk factor along with light & thin. Unintentionally "flexible" phones are going to bring out battery defects that might have been silent if not heated and squished repeatedly.
Article about it: How Samsung's phone design caused battery problems
Samsung, in one public announcement, acknowledged that "an overheating of the battery cell occurred when the anode-to-cathode came into contact, which is a very rare manufacturing process error."
"Energy storage is nature's abomination,"
"The more of those lithium ions you have in a very close proximity to each other, stored up, the more trouble you could be in. That's a very energetic environment."
"They're reaching a little bit when they make the batteries. Whenever anything new is mass produced that contains a flammable liquid, you have to cross your fingers a little bit."
-- Jay Whitacre, energy-material scientist and engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
"We've got an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. The unstoppable force is that I want more energy in my phone so it lasts all day. The immovable object is the more energy I put into these thin layers, the more likely my phone is going to blow up on an airplane."
"You want price, performance and safety? You get to pick two."
-- Matthew Nordan, energy investor, MNL Partners.
"When you start putting increasingly more energy in smaller and smaller packages, that's tricky in terms of safety. Because it starts to sound like an explosive device, which tends to be high energy, small package."
"The lithium-ion battery for electric vehicles is projected to be $90 billion. Batteries are, in a sense, becoming the new oil."
-- Steven Visco, guest scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CEO of Polyplus.
make the phones case 2-3mm thicker and put in a standard hard-case battery that runs down the entire backside of the phone with a much larger capacity...use a special mode where the battery is never completely discharged and never fully charged (>=4V). This would greatly increase the cycle life of the batteries.