Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

What's Wrong With Lithium Ion Batteries?

Posted by samzenpus on from the too-hot-to-handle dept.

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."

3 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What a moronic post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Never engineered a single thing in your life have you boy. safety is never dropped to cut costs or size. a single lawsuit showing otherwise and the company is ruined. Are you kidding me? Safety is analyzed in a cost-benefit analysis just like everything else. The greater the potential risk and potential liabilities, the greater importance safety will take. This is why nuclear engineers spend a lot more time engineering safety systems on nuclear reactors than a hardware engineer worries about the safety of a PS3 that could catch fire. To a hardware engineer a QA failure means that a lot of people complain about their iPhones that won't work. To an aeronautical engineer it means that a 747 just exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. You don't honestly think that the investment in safety is the same in each of these cases do you?
  2. Actually, if you RTFA, it's not moronic by Moraelin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. Dear moderators by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Dear moderators.

    There IS NO -1 Unfunny.

    You can not and should not use -1 Overrated or -1 Offtopic as a substitute if you don't find something funny. The reason being that the poster does not get karma for the +1 Funny, but you will burn his karma when you mod him down.

    +4 Funny
    -2 Overrated

    Net effect:
    +2 Funny, but with a -2 karma penalty.

    If you don't find something funny, leave it alone and don't moderate it!

    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.