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Aggressive design the cause of Galaxy Note7 battery explosions?

By Cookie Monster - on 11 Dec 2016, 10:00am

Aggressive design the cause of Galaxy Note7 battery explosions?

Note: This article was first published on 6th December 2016.

Image source: Instrumental

While Samsung has yet to share findings on what exactly went wrong with the Galaxy Note7, two hardware engineers from Instrumental claimed to have found the reason - the design of the phone.

During their testing, the engineers found out that the design of the Galaxy Note7 can compress the battery even during normal operation. The compression puts pressure on the polymer separator layers which are supposed to keep the battery safe.

The polymer separator layers function to keep the positive and negative layers apart. If there is interaction between the positive and negative layers, energy will go directly into the electrolyte and emit heat, which will result in more energy flow, more heat and eventually an explosion. This is somewhat similar to what Samsung initially disclosed during its preliminary investigations

Instrumental claims that Samsung engineers "designed out all of the margin in the thickness of the battery" to get the most capacity gain for each unit of volume. They believe that the battery manufacturing process was changing throughout development and the latest versions of the battery were not tested as vigorously as the first samples. They also expect the chassis of the phone be gradually pushed apart by the mechanical battery swell overtime even if there is no explosion. 

The latest report echoes the same findings from Bloomberg and Dr. Mark Johnsonan, an associate professor of Operations Management from Warwick Business School; the rush to bring the Galaxy Note7 could have made the company skip several critical testing stages. 

Source: Instrumental via PhoneArena

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