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Flaming Cellphones
phorm writes "Many of us have heard the urban legend of cellphones causing fires at the gas pump, but how about the hazards of replacement batteries? Reuters is carrying a story about a woman whose cellphone burst into flame, causing her superficial burn injuries. According to Nokia, the problem has occured before, and is related to non-brand replacement batteries. For various reasons, these batteries may overheat and catch fire, or even explode! So far I haven't found much info on whether this has happened with other brands of phone, though I do know that my little flip-phone gets very hot when running in analog mode. Perhaps some slashdot readers have had a similar experience?"
Call the fire brigade!
So my cellphone just burst into flames. Does anyone on Slashdot have an idea what I should do?
So...what...are they pink? Do they have pictures of Tinky Winky on them? Or what? :)
My journal has hot
This is only proof that there is a god, and he does not approve of cell-phoning and driving.
www.olin.edu
Are we supposed to welcome the cell phones as our new overlords, or the off-brand batteries?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
was she talking on the cellphone on a bus/train/mass transit system?
if so all I can say is:
"hah hah"
If you work for the CIA, do not take company messages while drinking coffee and browsing CDs at the record store.
From a Dutch article*
A spokeswoman for Siemens said a GSM (cellphone) of the Siemens brand exploded last year in Germany. It concerned a phone that was placed in a carkit. During recharging, the phone had overheated and exploded. Nobody was injured in that incident. The user of the phone had bought the battery at a fleamarket.
* http://nu.nl/news.jsp?n=193292&c=51
While the chances of something like this happening are rather unlikely, it's situations like this that are the reasoning for those "we hold no liability for 3rd party components" disclaimers.
Still, if this is happening there's obviously some hazardous defects with the batteries, and any responsible battery manufacturer would issue a recall. I remember that Apple had similar problems with some of the old Powerbook models, and they recalled the defective batteries/computers right away.
I'd like to see THAT happen in class!
Nobody calls me you insensitive clod.
"Derp de derp."
It's the MPAA out for revenge for the bad text messages reported recently. Watch out, lest your speakers burst into flame for playing illegal .mp3s. I think giving them the ability to light phones ablaze was too big a concesion for them, as punishment just for badmouthing their IP, but IP is IP, right?
SAILING MISHAP
The battery was shorted out.
.3 amps.
With NiCad batteries, this means several amps of current through a wire mean to handle perhaps
That means heat.
It doesn't mean the cellphone will spontaneously set on fire. It will only happen if the phone is damaged to the point the battery is shorted.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Apparently, whoever she was talking to hit the "ignite cellphone" button...
I worked with some people who were simulating battery-powered electronics. The program had an error message of "Device is on fire". People would call up the tech support for the simulator and ask what the error message means (perhaps they thought it was like Guru Meditation errors or something equally geek-funny). It meant, literally, that the simulated battery is on fire.
;)
The battery controller is in the phone, not the battery, so if it doesn't get the battery it expects to get, there's no limit to the pyromaniac fun that can be had.
Gentoo Sucks
I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my cellphones flaming .
I'm wondering. Do you have to hit these phones from behind?
This brings a whole new level to the concept of starting a flame war or having a heated discussion on the phone.
It also opens up the potential for cellphones to be sold as firestarters for campers outside of the transmission range, a wholly untapped market.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
Or the battery shorts out internally, due to shoddy materials/construction. The phone may be in fine working order, but the battery can still short out.
to quote from page 12...
Don't use the phone at a refueling point. Don't use near fuel or chemicals.
here's a pdf of the user guide:/ 3520.pdf
http://www.nokia.ca/english/products/user_manuals
Many LiOn batteries include built in gas gauging and over current protection. This costs about $1 in parts. Dallas makes some of the gas gauging parts -- DS2438 for instance. The gas gauging component is connected to the telephone via a 1 wire + ground interface. The overcurrent protection circuit is entirely internal. If the clone vendor wanted to save several nickels they could leave out the overcurrent chip and nobody would be the wiser until the battery shorts out.
The reason the overcurrent protection is built in is because Lithium Ion batteries will reach the flash temperature of plastic if current is drawn from them too fast.
So... don't rip the plastic off the pack and short them out except by remote control.
Thankyou.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
Perhaps some slashdot readers have had a similar experience?
Count me in.
Back in the late Eighties, I bought one of those 'brick' phones. Of course, as was the style at the time they weren't called that, because they just happened to be that size, nothing special.
As was the style at the time, the phones used ridiculous NiCad batteries for portability -- when you were in the car, they ran off of a device hooked up to the car battery, so you didn't need to wear the batteries out. Unfortunately the NiCad batteries were crap. As you probably already know, NiCad batteries have this really horrible 'memory' effect where if you recharge the battery before it's completely empty, it thinks that where you've just started to recharge it from is the *real* empty.. and it's not.
I could also only get thirty minutes' talk time out of a full charge, although it'd stay on standby on one charge for about three hours. Considering it took 12 hours to charge the NiCad (overnight charger), this wasn't a great arrangement if you wanted to use the phone while out and about during the daytime.
At the time, NiMH's weren't available for cell phones, in fact hardly anyone used them at all for anything really. But they delivered better battery life (for the time), didn't have the horrible memory effect, and charged more quickly than the NiCads charged.
So what I did was buy a second battery from Motorola for the princely sum of $95 (!!! and this was in the Eighties!!), I gutted it, and replaced all of the NiCad cells (yes, those big batteries are just collections of batteries all hooked together - it's not just one giant pool of acid in there..) with approximately 25 regular AA sized NiMH batteries that I bought at some store in a town. And, yes, I made sure the voltages all added up and that the current supply somewhat matched up. So I threw the casing back on the battery, hooked it up, and the phone worked! Talk-time was up to about ninety minutes, standby time was up to SIX hours (!! - I know, this sounds pretty ridiculous by today's standards, but there you go). I was walking on air.
A week later, I was walking along, cellphone in its case (they were big, so you carried them in things kinda like camera cases - you know, those big Nikon camera bags, that you can get a few lenses in).. phone was on standby,and suddenly BANG, the side casing of the battery ploughed a hole through the bag and fell onto the floor and suddenly all this goop (the battery acid) was running out. I dropped it immediately and battery acid was pouring out everyplace.
That was some dangerous stuff.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I like burning the phone bills.
Speech: Free
Beer: $699.00
...at the movie theather. Asshole who doesnt turn off his cellphone, gets a call, answers it and BOOM, the fireworks illuminate the room. Yes, entertainment at its finest!
I could see this being true, but I could just as easily see it as a story planted by the phone manufacturer for one of two purposes:
Lithium Ion batteries will do this very readily when drained or charged too fast...or if overheated past a certain point under what would otherwise be normal current draw...and it's one of the reasons, for example, Panasonic won't sell me the cells I need to fix my Powerbook G3 Lombard's battery(almost all laptop+camcorder batteries, save the newest, are simply AA-sized LiIon cells in various series+parallel configurations).
Panasonic won't sell to anyone except a 'certified systems designer' who has signed agreements saying they'll design proper charging and current/temperature limiting circuitry. God forbid you should simply want to fix a battery pack which is no longer made. I suspect they do it mostly to keep battery pack repair impossible and force everyone to simply run right out and drop $50(cell phones) to $300(some laptop batteries). Sound conspiracy-theory ripe? :-)
LiIon is actually a pretty crappy technology, at least as far as consumers are concerned. Nobody told consumers that for the extra talk minutes they got, their battery will be damn near worthless in a few months if they use their phone a lot...because LiIon looses a staggering amount of its capacity with every charge/discharge cycle- and the deeper the discharge, the more capacity is lost with each cycle. NiMH batteries don't have this problem. Funny thing, eh?
Even worse, the batteries never get recycled(you think the consumer drives to the town dump and puts the battery in the battery recyling box? Nooooooo), they simply get chucked. There are some really nasty chemicals in LiIon batteries(like just about any battery technology today.)
By the way, speaking of batteries and the environment, a lot of people have trouble with car batteries and simply buy new ones instead of taking care of their car battery better(granted, car batteries are usually recycled better, because it's easier, and there's a lot of material, but still...) This site covers just about anything you ever wanted to know about lead-acid batteries and how to properly care for them: http://uuhome.de/william.darden/
Please help metamoderate.
Excerpt from a related story ...
"John Smith, 45, received minor burns to his hands Thursday evening when his computer suddenly burst into flames. Operating system vendor Microsoft provided a statement, indicating that the cause of the small fire was due to the use of Star Office, a 'non-microsoft brand' product."
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
to the cellphone of that guy that goes around asking,"can you hear me now?" If only life were so sweet.
"At first, we thought it was just another snake cult."
Nah.. she downloaded a clip from a Madonna song to use as the ringer, and the RIAA is getting REALLY aggressive about protecting their artist's IP.
First, I saw the "electrostatic discharge" labels at the Mobil pumps today. They've been there a while. For good reason. They wouldn't alter old warning labels and stick them on every pump if there wasn't a reason. Business don't like spending money.
Gasoline ends in "ne" and have that "eeen" pronunciation to them. Xylene. Benzene. Toluene. All come from crude oil and all have a bloody low flash point.
Second, lithium batteries have the highest energy to weight ratio, and yes, folks are still careless with them. Most batteries I believe even have a little resistor in them to moderate the output. Lithium is nasty nasty stuff. I don't suppose anyone here remembers when Kodak started pumping out some of the first lithium cells? Guess how they stored them in the warehouse? On METAL shelves! The battery contacts shorted against the metal shelves and you can guess what happened.
Nasty thing about lithium batts is when they do burn. You essentially need Lithex to put the fire out. Granted you get a warning when something's up. There are sulfur in the batteries as well (a few other things, the mixture is part organic), so you can smell the typical rotten egg smell when the batteries are outgassing. When you smell that -- toss them and RUN. Defense contractors and places working with these things often have bomb blankets and ammo cases around for these suckers for a reason.
Point? Both of these are dangerous substances, and I wouldn't want to be near them when they start burning together!
-----
Stop, drop, and rollover minutes
In fact I'm using my phone to view Slashdot at this very moment and it's...... #### NO CARRIER ####
I was once involved in a similar incident, though the cause wasn't battery related. I was on an away mission, collecting soil samples for later study, when the captain ordered an immediate wide-range phaser volley directly on my communicator's position.
I never did learn why the order came through, and I spent the next two weeks in sick bay, listening to the doctor tell me how he's "not this" and "not that." At least I got a raise in rank, and a nice blue uniform to replace the scorched red one.
A guy goes to the doctor with both sides of his face badly burned. The doc asked him what happened. He says he was ironing his clothes when the phone rang and he picked up the hot iron and held it to his head.
So the doc asks what happened to the other side of his face.
"I had to call an ambulance."
To get them to do this on command?? Perfect for rude users in theaters, restaraunts, etc! Use the detonate destination feature :)
I do commercial radio repairs for a living so I may have a little insight here.
First, let me say that the heat generated by the phones while transmitting in analog mode is due to heat generated by the RF power amplifier IC Module in the phone. It is the most power-consuming part of the phone, followed by battery recharging and backlight hi-voltage power supplies. Hand held cell handsets are usually power limited to 300 mW max. The old Motorola Shoe Phones used to put out 3W of power max. (!) before the cell tower infrastructure was sufficiently built up to not need those levels of power.
But anyway, the battery only gets hot while charging. If it gets hot during discharge, it's under a serious over-current situation that is a "Bad Thing" and would never be designed as such. The only situation like that I've ever heard of is with some R/C racing cars that have special hi-temperature battery packs that are specifically designed to deliver high current into a near-short circuit condition. And they don't last very long in that sort of service!
Finally, about the urban legend - there actually may be something to it. I know that Motorola Handie-Talkies are sold in what the call "Intrinsically Safe" versions, that are for use in mines, and explosive atmospheres (chemical spills, fires, etc.)
All of the contacts and switches inside the radio are not hermetically sealed, and even the tiny arcs they make at 5-7 volts are enough to detonate an explosive atmosphere. So they make the radios with something like a tire valve at the bottom, and positively pressurize the radio to +1 atmosphere with nitrogen. These radios and their batteries are marked with green dots, and have an MSA (Mine Safety Associates) approval sticker on them.
To the extent that gas fumes are explosive in the air while refueling a vehicle, if the radio isn't an intrinsically safe one, the possibilty of detonation exists. Probably it would only happen from switch contact closure, if you were talking and not dialing or opening/closing the phone by the pump, then nothing would be likely to happen.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Those of us salivating all over the Samsung SPH-i500 PalmPDA/phone (units of which finally started trickling to market 3 weeks ago) have been hearing for weeks of the travails of this guy who's modded his to add Bluetooth and maybe more.
"I decided to build the sled out of the extended battery. Initially, I was planning on making the standard battery fit inside the extended case, but then I got a first hand lesson in the volitile nature of li-ion batteries. After the 2 FOOT FLAME, which looked like a smoke flare going off, this MESS is what was left of the battery ... What caused that? Believe it or not, it was LIGHTLY nicking it with the tip of my jewlers screwdriver! It doesn't take much."
http://i500.nopdesign.com/hw/ifire.jpg
The complete story is here; the flames start on page 2.
"Hello, Samsung? I would like 1000 units of your new Lithium-Ion bomb phone please. Do you ship to Chechnya?"
One simple rule for its versus it's
Bless this thy Holy Hand Phone of Antioch, that with it thou may burnest thy faces of thine enemies into little tiny bits, in thy mercy.
C'mon.....finish the job:
Doc: So, why is the first side burned twice as badly as the second side?
BBQ guy: Right after I hung up from talking to 911, the first caller called back.
[ba-da-BOOM!] Thank you very much...I'm here 'till Sunday.
The mechanism for the exploding cell-phone batteries is most likely the same mechanism for exploding car batteries. Namely, electricity can cause the oxygen and hydrogen in water to dissociate. When this happens, if they hydrogen and oxygen mixture cannot escape, the pressure and the stored energy in the gases builds up. Eventually, there is a spark, or a pop (and then maybe a spark) which causes the battery to explode and then the hydrogen/oxygen mixture burns.
I think you're overcomplicating things.
Take a piece of wire. Wrap it in plastic. Use it to short out a freshly-charged Ni-Cd, NiMH, lead-acid or Li-ion battery. Flames.
Any power source - battery, power supply, whatever - capable of good current can heat a piece of wire enough to cause ignition. Think of the wires in your toaster.
This is not like the old carbon-zinc Eveready "cat of 9 lives" batteries you'd short out when you were a kid. These actually have lots of stored energy and very little internal resistance to limit the short circuit current.
The problem now is that modern battery technology which gives us long cellphone and PDA charge times also means that we're carrying around a lot of chemical energy in our pockets, and any failure which results in a short circuit across the batteries will generate a lot of heat and potentially ignite plastic housings.
Never mind that as you increase the energy density of a battery, you must - by the very nature of electrochemical cells - be increasing the reactiveness (ie. toxicity and danger) of the chemicals used to make the battery.
If you think this is fun, just wait until we have electric cars! Think gasoline is nasty stuff? (I can't wait to say, "I told you so!".)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Any practical electric car will use fuel cells anyway, so told who so?
And the fuel cells do what with fuel? Provide a large power supply with little internal resistance, as is required to run the large loads of electric motors to drive the wheels. What do *you* think will happen when the wires or bus bars between the fuel cells and anything else get crimped during a car accident?
Never mind that fuel cells run on combustible fuel which must be brought into close proximity to the soon-to-be-glowing-red-hot output terminals of the car accident fuel cell. At least in conventional cars, the only statistically significant source of fuel ignition is sparking from randomly bent metal scraping on asphalt. Of course, you'll still have that, too - unless your fuel cell car is an Adobe. (Old SNL reference, all you Gen-Y types won't get it.)
Of course, this means that fuel cells will actually be practical. Given the notorious sensitivity of their osmotic membranes the sort of fuel contamination which passes right through most filtration devices, I can't imagine that you'll be filling your car up off too many gas station tanks.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.