Sanyo Blamed in Lenovo Battery Recall

ukhackster writes "Those overheating laptop batteries are back. Lenovo is recalling 205,000 'extended' batteries which shipped with its ThinkPad machines, or were bought as replacements. Slashdot readers will doubtless remember the flak which Sony attracted last year, after it was blamed for exploding Dell notebooks and several massive recalls. This time, the batteries were made by Sanyo. Their engineers determined that the failure was repeatable by dropping machines using the batteries from a certain height and at a certain angle. As soon as the repeatable nature of the flaw was determined, a recall was issued."

Comments

They're actually quite high

[EmbeddedJanitor]

I've been in the product development game too long to be suprised by this. I've seen a lot of pretty strange mechanical damage, often to do with batteries.

Batteries are pretty dense and thus tend to have a lot of inertia relative to the rest of the guts of a device. If you drop an electronic device (or anything for that matter) onto a hard surface, it is in for a good few gs of acceleration. Sure, there are posts and reatining plastic etc, but these tend to be stronger in some angles than others.

Sometimes certain damage only happens within a certain "shock window". Eg. Drop from 2 ft and nothing breaks, the plastic retains everything; drop from 3ft and the two posts retaining the battery fail allowing the battery to strike the hard disk and get dented; drop from 6 ft and a different buch of posts fail causing the stress to be relieved in a different way and the battery does not strike the hard disk.

And, actually, lab engineers do routinely test for drop and vibration failure but that is more in the interests of seeing at what point a system fails rather than looking for safety issues a battery explosion.