All of us are little bit curious about the reasons of mobile phone battery exploding. The above topic has become a hot gossip out of the box with recent situation regarding Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Exploding a battery is really dangerous when we are using anything. Other than the Note 7‘s incident there were several reporting regarding the explosions of mobile devices within the past decade.
Why we should worry about mobile phone battery exploding.
Recent forecasts reveals
that the number of worldwide mobile users will reach to 4.77 billion in 2017.
So, we have to strictly consider about the safety of those devices. There were
many discussions between people regarding this and less likely it is a children
to get injured from a battery issue. We all hate to see a brand that we love
experiencing safety issues and we really hate to see people getting injured
further more.
Samsung Note 7 is not the
first ever device that has gone through battery problems and probably it will
not be the last one of the list. Also this is not the only widespread recall of
a single mobile device regarding an issue-as earlier the Nokia people know very
well. However this is not a good thing, but it’s a big thing to be solved. Let’s
research the reasons behind mobile phone battery exploding.
Also See: 8 Tricks-How to save battery on Smartphones.
Also See: 8 Tricks-How to save battery on Smartphones.
Operation of your phone’s
battery.
First of all it’s better to get to know, what is the
operation of the lithium-ion battery inside your phone? The name lithium-ion
gives us a hint about the procedure of electricity transfer using charged
lithium ions.
Electronics combines with chemistry— those are the basics for a battery.
Lithium-ion batteries
accumulate energy and release it depending on chemical reactions. There are two
electrodes on the battery a cathode and anode. The anode is connected to the
(-) negative edge, this electrode generates and gathers negatively charged ions
around it. The cathode is connected to the (+) positive edge, this electrode
generates and gather positively charged ions around it. There is an electrolyte
between two electrodes. The electrolyte is usually filled with a large density
of metallic salts, most of the situations it is lithium. The anode and cathode
are separately placed inside electrolytes. The electrolyte (Lithium-ions) are
separated by a physical barrier. So the electrodes will not contact each other
inside the battery.
When it is not charging
while your device draws current from the battery, the positively charged
cathode pushes the gathered ions towards the anode and anode collects those
ions. It makes an electricity flow through your device. When you are charging
the device the reverse will happen.
Lithium is widely used in recent battery manufacturing as its light weight, easy recharge ability and holding the charge for a long time.
What are the reasons behind mobile phone battery exploding?
Let’s make this answer
really easy for beginners with a thorough explanation. The electrolyte mixture
paste of a Li-ion battery is highly volatile. It will begin violent reactions
with other metals easily. The melting point of the electrolyte is very low. (Around
180 degrees of Celsius). Inside a sealed battery packaging, the generated pressure
can break or slightly damage the casing, then the hot electrolyte will come out
and interact with the metallic components of the device. This may build a fire
or an explosion. Some of the Li-ion batteries are designed with a vented hole
to handle such situations. Simply there are two main thing that makes a Li-ion
battery explode- heat and other physical distortions occurred on the battery.
Let’s have an in-depth look in to the both.
Overheating and overcharging.
This has been identified as
the most regular reason behind battery failures. Some wrong thing occurred inside
the charging circuit and the supplied power begins to drive the internal
chemical reaction of the battery. In order to that an exact point of the battery
may get too hot eventually and meanwhile when it is charging it will not cool
down, occurring a process called thermal runaway.
At this situation, the hot
area will produce an excess heat by itself, which will spread to the other
areas of the electrolyte. It will lead the process to overheat the whole
battery. This excess heat will build a pressure on the packaging while expanding
the covering of the battery and split out sticky and highly flammable
electrolyte with hot steams. Once this is exposed to the air, it will generate a
fire.
Thermal runaway may occur very fast, you will not feel the heat even before the battery begins to fail.
If the things happened like
that, it may lead the way to make physical damages and injuries to the things
that are around the device. The main board, glass or plastic packaging can also
get in to fire while you are holding the phone. This may occur very quickly
even before you feel the heat of your device to your hand.
Luckily, there are millions
of Li-ion batteries manufactured in each year and they got an extremely low
rate of failures with respect to thermal runaway. When considering the safety
measure that are applied when designing a battery such as adding non-flammable
supplements to the electrolyte and insulation coatings. However, if your device
pop-up a notification saying that ”it’s very hot and will not charge or perform at optimum speed”, let it to cool
down to avoid occurring of thermal runaway.
Physical damage.
Lithium-ion batteries are
developed to draw higher power, low-weight and easy to recharge. So, they are
designed with small layers and cells separating the electrodes with thin insulation
coatings.This design aspects are highly considered to reduce the weight and
spacing of the device as a significant amount of space is accommodated by the
battery.
Due to thin or small layers
and casing, it’s really easy to occur damages. If the short circuit is made by
the damaged battery, it may produce an instant discharge through the short
circuit. Instant electrical discharge may be really explosive and will heat up
the electrolyte with the spark. Hot flammable electrolyte and exposure to the
air are great recipe for a huge disaster.
Reasons behind exploding Note 7?
Nobody knows the exact
reason behind exploding some of the Note 7 devices. But Samsung knows. They
have published a short statement via their U.K-Division. But they haven’t explained
the real situation and it doesn’t make any sense.
Some of the people have
reported the battery was failing without plug-in to the charging adapter. Also,
you will see the images that a large area of device are not burnt. We assume
that, it’s not due to the thermal runaway. However the Health Canada says the only failure was from overheating the
device.
Anyone, rather than the
Samsung personnel could only give and good explanation for what’s going on.
Also see: Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Review.
Also see: Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Review.
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