Tougher lithium-ion design and manufacturing safeguards must be introduced to bring safety standards up to date following Samsung’s recall of its Galaxy Note 7 mobile phones, says a US agency.
Chairman of the US government agency Consumer Product Safety Commission Elliot Kaye made the call in a statement released last week.
In it he said: “At a minimum, industry needs to learn from this experience and improve consumer safety by putting more safeguards in place during the design and manufacturing stages to ensure that technologies run by lithium-ion batteries deliver their benefits without the serious safety risks.”
The comments come after Samsung revealed that four extensive investigations concluded that design and manufacturing faults had led to the Note 7 catching alight.
More than 20,000 fully-assembled Note 7s and more than 300,000 batteries were then tested by 700 engineers and researchers, according to Samsung, following last year’s failures.
Their conclusion was simple: faults in the batteries had caused thermal runaway. The resulting global recall on all Note 7s has been well documented.
Investigators found the anode in the first batch of batteries was deflected in the upper-right corner of the battery.
Investigators found the replacement batteries, from a second supplier, contained a different manufacturing fault, but one that led to the same problems with the battery.
High welding burrs on the cathode of the replacement batteries resulted in the penetration of the insulation tape and separator, causing direct contact between the positive tab and anode. An additional contributing factor was a number of batteries were missing insulation tape.
ESPL’s lithium-ion consultant Rick Howard told BBB: “What I heard, probably fourth-hand, was that the Samsung cells were designed and constructed thinner than their predecessors, but with the same amount of innards.
“When lithium-ion batteries are cycled, they undergo expansion and contraction, and there has to be some give somewhere. In this instance, what gave was the separator, which after all, is just a thin film of plastic.
“The high pressure of expansion forced a film breach, allowing anode-cathode contact, and voila, the cell shorted, with predictable results.”
In his blog post, Shelly Palmer, CEO of technology firm The Palmer Group, hinted the issues might have arose due to ‘market pressure’.
Palmer implied the company was so desperate to rush out a thinner, lighter, more powerful product that the innovation could not keep up.
In pushing the boundaries, Palmer said, the battery supply companies that had previously delivered billions of batteries with no problems were asked to ‘push the envelope’ too far.
Palmer wrote in his blog: “If you are committed to a culture of innovation or if you are forced by market pressure continuously to improve your products, you must also innovate and continuously improve your business processes.
“How are component parts specified, ordered, quality controlled, product tested, consumer tested, revised? What systems are in place from ten years ago (when every single supplier was going to not only fight for your business but also fight to keep it) that should be adapted to the way business is done today?”