Michael Ross via EV wrote:
There plenty of ways to design a battery that may explode. Samsung apparently did one. Could be a short develops for some reason.
Indeed there are! Problems can occur in the battery itself, or the connections to it, or the charger, or even in the load that is connected. Shorting any fully-charged battery, by whatever means, will dump a tremendous amount of energy and can easily cause a fire.
Sadly, very few facts have been released about the Galaxy Note 7 fires. Samsung has only said, "As of September, we are aware of 35 major battery problems... there was a manufacturing process error with the battery cell... caused the anode and cathode to short... We are recalling 2.5 million phones."
What we get instead are anecdotes, fear-mongering, and spin-doctoring. No one wants to talk about what really went wrong, so we can learn from it and fix the problem. No one wants rational discussions about precautions people should take, or what they could be doing differently.
The consequences are severe and real, not overblown. Do you keep cans of gasoline indoors? There is a lot of energy packed into petroleum and charged Li ion cells. That makes them dangerous and a mobile manufacturer better design them and their support systems well. Li ion cells are commonly used where the dangers are greater (on your bed or sofa), packing lots of energy in them is nontrivial to be sure. I personally would shy away from S7s for now.
I think it's a matter of degree; not black-and-white. Nothing is perfectly safe, and 35 out of 2.5 million is a pretty good safety record. Other phones have burned as well; they just aren't in the media spotlight at the moment. The S7 may, or may not be any more dangerous than any other cellphone. We really don't have the facts to know.
You don't store gasoline in open containers; but you use it anyway in your car. It's "relatively" safe when used responsibly.
Likewise, batteries are relatively safe when used responsibly. The manufacturer has to do proper testing, quality control, packaging, charging, fusing, and get all the other little details right. Responsible manufacturers get it right. El-cheapo ones may not bother!
As consumers, we need to remember that *all* batteries contain nasty chemicals which can leak, stain, corrode, and even poison us. They store large amounts of energy, and can cause fires. The higher the energy density, the greater the risk. So just a few common-sense measures can help to reduce the risk:
- don't buy the highest energy density battery you can get - don't put it in places where a leak or fire would be especially bad - don't leave it on charge indefinitely - don't routinely charge it to maximum - don't routinely run it dead - don't subject it to extreme temperatures -- The standardization of computers would be a disaster; and so it will probably happen. -- Alan J. Perlis -- Lee Hart, 814 8th Ave N, Sartell MN 56377, www.sunrise-ev.com _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Read EVAngel's EV News at http://evdl.org/evln/ Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
