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What's Wrong With Lithium Ion Batteries?
An anonymous Coward writes "Lithium ion batteries short-circuit. They overheat. They burst into flames. The reasons behind the recent spate of problems with a technology invented by Sony more than a decade ago are complex and varied, making for one big engineering headache."
Yeah, but they're great for bipolar disorders.
And isn't that what a battery per definition has?
Engineers face difficult challenges all the time. Everything is a tradeoff of sorts. Safety is routinely traded against cost and size. LiIon and LiPoly both have energy densities considerably higher than the next readily available technology (NiMH), thus the reason to drive towards the technology.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14417
I wrote that before batteries going boom was the latest fashion trend. The problem is simple, you have a lot of energy in a small area and people crying out for higher densities. If _ANYTHING_ goes wrong, you have a high likelihood for a lot of energy released in a short amount of time.
Couple this with reactive/flamable substance that make up batteries, and you have a lightshow. There is no magic to it all, simple physics. Lots of energy released around reactive things, you need both for a modern battery.
Some designs minimize the risk, none remove it. As always, nothing new under the sun.
-Charlie
The announcement last month that 46 million Nokia-branded lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries made by Matsushita Battery Industrial could potentially short circuit and overheat was just the latest in a spate of product advisories and recalls of the technology over the past two years.
But it's not as if Li-ion batteries are at the early point in their life cycle when you would expect these sorts of problems to crop up. Sony invented the technology back in 1990. So why is it failing now?
The theories behind the technology's recent spotty performance are complex and varied, which makes fixing the problem a perplexing engineering challenge.
A Constantly Evolving Technology
"You can't really say that for the first ten years the battery makers got it right and now they're screwing it up," says Jim Miller, Manager of Argonne National Lab's Electrochemical Technology Program. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, his group's research is directed at developing new materials for Li-ion batteries and addressing some of the major issues in scaling up the technology.
Miller points out that Li-ion battery technology is not just a single design or composition, but rather it's an entire family of chemistries that is constantly evolving. "When Sony invented it in 1990, it was lithium cobalt oxide. But cobalt is expensive and so engineers started replacing it with nickel, which costs less. And then as time went on engineers found that they could substitute cheaper nickel manganese alloys for the nickel."
Cost reduction isn't the only driving force behind the evolutionary march of Li-ion batteries. The desire to extend battery life, achieve higher energy densities and faster charging times, and improve reliability has led to a constant tinkering of the technology. Energy densities are double what they were five years ago, for example, and new surface coatings are being applied to make the batteries more stable and reduce their reactivity rates.
Ever-Increasing Demands, More Trade-offs
The trade-offs inherent in these often mutually exclusive goals make for a diabolical design challenge: You can make a Li-ion battery that has high performance, for example, but the trade-off is a shorter life. And as every design engineer knows, making the right trade-offs and getting everything right takes time, experience, and a bit of finesse.
"A problem doesn't necessarily pop up during the first generation of cells," says Miller. "Things may look fine in the lab and then when you go to production you find that the technology behaves in a slightly different way, which means things can and do go wrong."
Something certainly went wrong at Sony last year, resulting in the recall of millions of its Li-ion laptop batteries. As for what exactly led to the short-circuiting problem that posed a risk of fire and in one case caused a Dell notebook to burst into flames, Sony Spokesperson Rick Clancy says that there were different conclusions at different levels.
"When you produce lithium ion batteries, the objective is to either have zero metal contaminants or at least as few of them as possible and surround them by a protective shell or layer so that they cannot penetrate the separator," explains Clancy. The separator in a Li-ion battery keeps the anodes and cathodes from touching each other and causing a short circuit.
Clancy says that Sony engineers discovered that there was a greater frequency of these metal particles escaping from one part of the cell and entering the other part. They've addressed the issue at a product level by designing in a stronger lining, he notes.
But there were other
We have lead in children's toys, combustible batteries, slime in the Ice machine, one can only wonder what will they think of next?
and look at what's right. First thing that comes to mind, no other abbreviation sounds as cool as Li-on.
Rawr.
Anything that contains lots of energy in a small and compact volume, is dangerous. Explosives, and modern batteries, are really not that different. Both contain a huge amount of energy, in a comparatively small area. As battery technology improves, batteries will become even more dangerous.
With old heavy duty, or alkaline batteries, the worst that could happen was usually a leak. While annoying, it usually didn't pose any dangers. Modern batteries catch fire and explode. Eventually, we'll probably have a nuclear powerplant inside our mp3-players, at which time, they will hopefully include some additional safeguards, such as a fuse. But all modern batteries (lithium, lithium-ion, lithium-polymer) will explode or catch fire, if there's a serious enough malfunction.
I think some shitty Fab is to blame for these batteries popping.
3 years ago, you rarely heard of batteries popping.
lest we forget the markets flooded with cheap aftermarket chargers?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Fortunately, we have supercapacitors. While they're not there yet for energy density (still about 10x too little) they're rapidly improving. 10x isn't much at the rate these things have been improving, and there are plenty of labs with pieces that are much better than currently available commercial offerings, but that still need development work. If I had to guess, I'd say it's 5 years until the first supercaps appear in serious commercial use, and less than 10 until LiIon has gone the way of NiMH.
Of course, if you believe the rumors then it might be even faster than that -- we might be seeing serious applications in a year or so.
I, for one, will be glad to give LiIon a proper burial. But until then, we work with what's available.
It doesn't matter whether it's a battery, a fuel cell or whatever, you'll have a shit load of energy in a small volume.
Deleted
It MUST be bad!
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
As others have mentioned, the problem with the existing batteries is energy density. All fuel sources have the exact some problem, from capacitors, to uranium, to gasoline. They can release all that energy dangerously under the wrong conditions. This isn't a problem for which there is any easy fix, other than being really careful to insure those conditions are never met.
Existing capacitors in your computer can make quite a boom...
To do this, we could vote W. in for a 2'nd term. Oh yeah. That IS the problem. Well, here is hoping that voters will be brighter next time.
Acually, if you actually RTFA, it raises exactly the same problems you write about, so I'm curious how you could call it moronic without, you know, calling yourself a moron ;)
That said, I still have to wonder about some tradeoffs. Essentially, the way I read the article:
1. A lot (if not most) of the increasing risk was in the name of cutting costs as such, or cost per capacity. E.g., the original Cobalt, which was expensive but apparently safe, got then replaced with Nickel, then with even cheaper Nickel-Manganese alloy. I'm not sure how that can be a problem, but _something_ (this or something else) along the way apparently turned a safe battery design into a potential time bomb.
2. (Or maybe 1a.) They seem to be blaming the factory in China where everyone outsourced the actual manufacturing to. Again in the name of cutting costs. Maybe it's just blame-shifting and finger pointing, but it raises a valid theoretical concern. It's not easy to know, once a battery is assembled and sealed, what really is inside. If, theoretically, they shafted you for an extra buck, how would you know? You can put all sorts of checks in place in your own factory, but once you've outsourced it, it's out of your control.
It even gives you an example of what can go wrong in that scenario. If the separating membrane doesn't soften and collapse at a given temperature, the battery essentially just lost the designed protection against catching fire. What if someone replaces that foil with something cheaper, but which doesn't work that way?
3. (Or maybe 1b.) Apparently at least one batch is suspected to have been manufactured with counterfeit materials. I have to wonder if this wasn't just because they were cheaper. I.e., cost cutting again.
4. Not cost cutting, but competitive advantage again, apparently some laptop manufacturers recharge their batteries more "aggressively" (read: exceed the rated recharge current) so they can get a minor competitive edge there. It apparently (according to TFA) causes the battery to vibrate, and might cause particles to impale the membrane and shortcircuit the battery.
So while I'm not against capitalism or anything, it makes me, you know, wonder. Maybe the drive to cut costs can be taken to dangerous extremes? Just a thought.
Yes, it should fix itself, companies would in an ideal world avoid loss of reputation due to faulty products, etc. But sometimes it's too late. E.g., it's already suspected that a plane crash was due to a laptop igniting in the hold. E.g, an even worse case was when in 1937 a pharma company offered a liquid antibiotic where the actual antibiotic wasn't solluble in water, but someone found out it was solluble in diethylene glycol, a deadly poison. It was what prompted the FDA to mandate extensive testing for medicine. (And speaking of diethylene glycol, it seems to keep reappearing recently in Chinese-manufactured toothpaste. No doubt because it's cheaper than something less toxic.) Etc.
Do I have a solution? Nope. It makes me wonder, though.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The batteries that are causing troubles now are all Lithium polymer batteries. The electrolyte-fluid in them has been replaced with a polymer that amongst other things made it possible to replace the heavy metal cylinder with aluminium/plastic packaging and make the battery in all kinds of forms.
Unfortunately, at the same time the chemistry of the cells was changed such that if a thermal runaway ever happened, the venting gasses would ignite with oxygen and would ignite the cells next to it too. That is exactly what is happening.
I am rather supprised that no one yet has mentioned A123 systems. They make/market a new type of lithium-(nano)phosphate cell, that has none of the drawbacks of lithium-polymer batteries. They will not catch fire in a thermal runaway or when pierced, can be much more abused than LiPos and have a much longer lifespan to boot (2000 cycles instead of 500). It's no wonder that these batteries will be in the next generation of hybrid cars, as they weigh half as much as the NiMH batteries used now (LiPo would be too dangerous in a collision) and can generate much more current too. (~10C for NiMH, ~40C for A123).
So there is hope one the battery technology front, it's just that the current best option is a bit dangerous.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
So making sure that no heavy-metalls are in your product, which costs money of course, wasn't left out here?
They were first released commercially by Sony, they were not invented by Sony.
Don't pack so much energy into such small package! Use conventional lead batteries instead!
Seriously, the problem is that the technology has excellent properties of low internal resistance and high capacity per mass. If the pack shorts for reason or another, all the energy is released in short order, causing it to practically explode.
There is also another problem. The charging. The Li-Ion/Polymer batteries will not chemically stop charging when they are "full" in terms of what it is supposed to hold. You can overcharge the pack until it gets unstable and finally shorts itself, again causing the explosion.
There is nothing you can do to the electrochemical pair without losing its positive characteristics. External safe guards, such as charge cutters and current limiters can only do so much. The pack can still short internally.
Bot Assisted Blogging
I've been waiting to see ethanol-fueled microturbines in the mass market for a while now, and have so far been disappointed. They're a bit big for phones but ought to work in laptops and would IMO be spectacular for power tools. They pose their own dangers, though; what happens when a fuel cell ruptures and the turbine turns into a flamethrower?
Lithium Ion batteries don't like getting hot, once they do they go into meltdown and the chemicals become unstable.
Panasonic recently developed a safer battery which has heat insulation.
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Wait! If we get rid of lithium batteries, how will MacGyver whip up an improvised fusion weapon from a laptop battery, heavy water, and high explosives?
No, the reasons are not ambiguous, they are clearly outlined. There is nothing wrong with the technology, the entire problem is the lack of quality control in battery factories in China. Sony is not the only one to get screwed by poor QC in Chinese factories, so has Mattell who are scrambling to recall ~20 million toys painted with lead paint, and J&J, who are scrambling to recall 10 million fake diabetes kits
In the article itself, fingers are clearly pointed
I don't think anybody realizes just how shoddy quality control is in China. Just as there is absolutely no respect for intellectual property, the Chinese, being new to capitalism, don't understand the value of quality control. They've never had to suffer the consequences of legal action.
The culture just does not exist. Some argue that this is a good sign, a necessary phase in capitalism that China is passing through that the USA passed through once before.
I'm not trying to be a troll. China I'm sure will improve and their industry is surely chastened by the huge hue and cry around the world. But until things get better, watch out, and for more than just exploding batteries:
Just setting the record straight
shooting is not too good for my enemies
Didn't Bell Labs and university researchers come up with Lithium Ion technology. Sony were first to market commercially, but I've never seen anything crediting them with the invention of the technology.
You could have someones eye out with one of those... here, try this handful of wet mud instead...
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
It's all about size, weight, and the abusive charge cycle that laptops and cellphones are required to go through. From what I've read, the thing that really stands out for lithium batteries is the lack of cell memory. Here's a link comparing 4 battery types: http://batteryuniversity.com/partone-21.htm
New! Device Legs: These legs will help your poor OEM installed product escape any hamfistedness it may encounter. Ava
It's not the Power Glove.
God spoke to me.
if they hadn't bloated their OS and Apps so much, we could get away with far lower energy densities for Laptops... :) And if anyone questions this, just go and ask some of the old hands how much life they got on their old DOS and Win 3.1 laptops... I could run my old DOS based laptop for almost 20 hours on a full charge with just old-fashioned Ni-Cads in the battery compartment... and I could easily swap them out and use ordinary batteries if I couldn't get to a mains socket... Now you're lucky if you can get 2 hours out of a laptop
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The article quotes Don Sadoway commenting on the GM Volt: "I have real worries when we try to build a large format Li-ion battery with 100X the capacity and put it out there on the highway"w s/news070809/) and they have solutions to most of the exploding battery problems...
But GM are working with A123Systems for the battery packs (http://www.a123systems.com/newsite/index.php#/ne
fluoride compounds have been used to treat mania, and hyperthyroidism for almost 100years. of course these days its in the form of mass medication through the water supply.
m l
http://www.slweb.org/galletti.html
http://www.bruha.com/pfpc/html/thyroid_history.ht
Here they're about half the price. I'd only buy them from someone I knew I could harrass if there were any problems. It may be relevant that the factories that make most of these are about 20 miles away.
and the computer is worth much more than the battery).
I bought an old Dell Inspiron. To replace the battery would have doubled the price. So it's a desktop now.
I therefore suggest the following test for razor safety (for now):
You can test it by slitting your fucking wrists and if they bleed, then razors are dangerous.
After you slit your fucking wrists, then run a hot bath and place your fucking wrists in the fucking water until death.
-mwvdlee
You may be interested to know, the factor of safety is actually very low in aerospace. Meaning, engineers design systems with smaller margins for exceeding design requirements. The reason is weight; every pound you add by over engineering a part's yield strength, is a pound you have to get in the air or fly to space. The industry compensates for this low factor of safety with very strict maintenance cycles and regulations.
If automobiles were engineered like this, we could probably use half the amount of fuel we currently do. The downside is you would have to get monthly or even weekly inspections and preventative maintenance.
Of course, my source could be wrong.
Really, a superb article. I particularly like the part where chemists say that the LiIon batteries are so simple, they are "physicist's batteries"
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
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AMD and Intel kept making more powerful processors for desktop machines. Laptops had to become more powerful to stay competitive in performance with desktops. Then AMD came out with new low power processors and people started putting Pentium 4 parts in laptops to compete (fortunately, Intel finally managed to come up with the Pentium M a year later or the problem would be 100x worse), which put battery makers under enormous pressure to come out with products that could supply the power. The Li battery is basically sound but the technology was pushed beyond what it was capable of. Too much power in too small a space.
The fault is the company who manufactured. THEY are cutting the corners in a competition against each other as well as against companies elsewhere. The Western company SHOULD be doing at least spot checks, but QA is the responsibility of the manufacturer. Chinese gov. should have a lot of blame by pushing the chinese manufacturer to do things cheaper to keep the work in house.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Official lame joke of the day:
There must be a rootkit in the battery.
Nobody's gonna argue that we couldn't make do with less bloat. But just two hours out of a laptop? I haven't had a hog that bad in five or six years. I remember the Pentium III generation of laptops, though-- not pretty. I had a thinkpad at work that could handle 90 minutes on a good day. My current Dell piece-o-crap manages more than four and a half hours on a year-old battery, with an Nvidia graphics card. Battery life has been improving somewhat since they started paying attention to it again, and things started moving in the right direction again when the Pentium M first appeared.
Just speculating wildly, but I wonder whether 'whiskers' from crummy RoHS-compliant lead-free solder might be causing shorts.
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
legislation in the US (or anywhere else) don't mean shit to china... I'm sure there is legislation in place to keep lead paint off toys(and everything). If you want something made to a decent quality bring it back to US factories. China don't give a shit about anyone. i watched a PBS special where they showed how they're poisoning themselves, in one part a paper mill was dumping chemicals straight in to the river where the whole province drinks and gets water from (it was making everyone sick), unless an inspector was coming(they always knew ahead of time). They told about a folk song about the factory is being inspected if the river isn't foamy white. Everything is so corrupt their that people who tried to get action taken got their ass beat by people afraid of losing a job. And when the factory get the book thrown at them its a fine(about $10,000 USD). As for capitalism? I'm unsure what the hell is capitalistic about allowing unfair competition. We couldn't compete if we were able to pay chinese wages because our country has enforced environmental laws. Being an extremist on the subject i'd close all trade to Asia (except japan). I think getting rid of jobs in the US is more un-capitalistic. we should open factories and make them compete against each other. Maybe have actual innovation? Like when new ideas came form Bell Labs or Xerox's PARC instead of government funded universities?
Dear moderators.
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If anything, every +1 Funny is a penalty in itself, as they prevent moderators from adding more +1 Insightful/Informative points once it hits the ceiling.
And no, this post is not -1 Offtopic, as it is directly relevant to the parent. Thread drift is to be expected, and should not trigger Offtopic moderation. Thread jumps should be penalized, when they occur, but the children of a post are not -1 Offtopic if they address anything written in that post. If every post were to relate to the original article and not the post you actually reply to, there would be no need for a thread system. Since there is one, expect and accept thread drift and topic drift.
The Segway, not the most successful enterprise ever (but still selling a lot of 'em) only became really useful when they increased the effective range by a factor of 2.5 by replacing the nickel-metal hydride batteries on the first generation by a lithium-ion battery. They couldn't use lithium-ion to begin with because of exactly the problems cited herein...nothing like a rolling bomb to make your rep as a company.
They went with a battery made by Valence Technologies, which uses phosphate electrodes to produce a Li-ion battery which is not a firebomb in a plastic shell. The company, which has been having its own troubles, has a very effective video showing a military-grade Li-ion pack being shot up by a machine gun next to a Valence pack. The military pack turns into a thermal grenade-cum-jetpack, while the Valence pack just sits there and smokes. It doesn't exactly stay cool, but it doesn't burst into jets of flame either.
A lot of posters here seem to believe that just because something contains a large amount of energy there is a reasonable possibility for that energy to be released in an ever accelerating manner. This is not true. The hydrogen in a cup of water could theoretically be fusioned to generate more energy than the Hiroshima bombs, yet a cup of water is by no means a dangerous device (well, mostly). Similarly a rusty iron bar next to a block of aluminium is far from dangerous, but powder the two and mix them together and you got thermite, which if ignited can easily melt its way straight through the hood of your car.
The problem with Li-ion batteries is NOT that they contain a lot of energy. In fact, a block of butter has higher energy density. The problem with these batteries is that lithium is a very reactive alkali metal, and the electrolytes used in most Li-ion batteries do not make things better. To suggest that it is the raw energy content of Li-ion batteries that make them dangerous really is ignorant at best. You probably have foods with higher energy densities back in your fridge.
Nah, not in the 1937 case. There it wasn't just to mix something, it was the whole liquid. And to the best of my knowledge it wasn't "low enough" or "some people", but simply everyone who drank that medicine died in horrible pain over then next two weeks or so.
It was simply untested. They took the first thing that disolved the actual antibiotic, and that was it. Sorta the chemistry equivalent of, "it compiles, let's ship it."
Surrealistic, but true.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Good one. Am I far off if I would guess this is a matter of reaction kinetics in the end, and not of thermodynamics?
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
The Li-ion batteries were not "invented" by Sony, first proposal of such batteries was in 1960s.
The first commercial battery was released by Sony in 1991.
(from wikipedia)
China has a bad human rights record, bad quality control, ineffective environmental controls, and a cultural attitude to I.P. that is alien to ours.
But they're cheaper.
Processed factory-fied food (plant and animal) is blander and more adulterated than organic.
But it's cheaper.
The party-balloon gas tank in those ol' Ford Pintos was known, in the design phase, to be more hazardous than the alternatives.
But it was cheaper.
Big box stores cut off the oxygen supply to funky, interesting local retailers.
But they're cheaper.
Slashing social and infrastructure spending to provide tax cuts starves the present and dooms the future.
But it's cheaper.
Pirating software is legally and morally wrong. (It's not actually the *same* as stealing, but it's still wrong).
But it's cheaper.
Have I done most of the above?
Yes.
I'm going to hell; I'll save you a seat.
Pharmaceutical catchall? Triggering events just being heightened stress? This is just all so wrong...