iFixit stabs batteries – for science – so you don't have to If you've ever wondered how and why lithium-ion batteries in devices like smartphones and laptops combust, iFixit is here with an explosive video and some accompanying wisdom on safe battery-handling. Tech writer team lead Arthur Shi and teardown techie Shahram Mokhtari from the DIY electronics repair site got together to stab …
I've had that happen while repairing my co-workers phone, I was able to pull the battery out and throw it through the door into the parking lot and then it was easy to put a new one into the phone, it's still working.
Fly on a plane and they will tell you not to readjust your seat if you had dropped your phone ... we've heard of that issues a few times on planes and occasionally we hear about the trash pickup vehicle catching fire when it "packs" the trash pickup contends, maybe someone left a phone in an old jacket pocket in the trash?
can't but won't. Cause costs. And liability costs, and... other costs. And the costs I couldn't even imagine, but people paid very well to have much bigger imagination than I, do imagine, and articulate. So no. Other than 'niche' products, which make you pay for that extra cost (being higher than previously, because those connectable batteries are now not mainstream but niche), and add an extra markup, on account of being niche / green / planet-friendly / whatever marketing shit currently stands.
The video might be fun but there's nothing new (or even exclusive to Lipo) in the information. Furthermore, the idea that there's a magic "25% charge" safety level is a hazardous one. The general golden rule for safety has always been "remove the power source before working on the kit". This applies to everything electrical from a mains hair drier to a pocket calculator and everything in between. But if the battery is glued into your phone (dumb move) don't take chances.
> The general golden rule for safety has always been "remove the power source before working on the kit".
The article was about fire hazard from the chemical properties of an object.
Your golden rule is a response to electrical hazards ( unplug the toaster before trying to prise out a jammed piece of toast), mechanical hazards (isolate the lathe from the power supply before changing the tool, because you don't want it starting up accidently when your fingers are inside it), and to avoid damaging circuits. [Also, merely isolating some electrical items does not render them electrically safe, since capicitors store charge]
Electrical safety isn't really an issue when dealing with low voltage, low current batteries as used in phones and toys. Nor are phones a mechanical risk to the user should they start up unexpectedly.
The chief risk of a phone battery to a user is that of combustion, so iFixit recommended reducing the charge to 25% before working on the device.
Oh, and batteries are glued instead of screwed because doing so more evenly distributes the mechanical forces acting on the battery (and also makes for quicker dismantling for material separation come the end of the object's useful life).
Chemical risk: don't eat the battery.
Mechanical risk: don't drop the battery on your foot.
Oh, and batteries are glued instead of screwed because doing so more evenly distributes the mechanical forces acting on the battery (and also makes for quicker dismantling for material separation come the end of the object's useful life).
Yeah, right. Prising off a glued-on battery is far more likely to damage it and make it more difficult to recycle.
And if these guys can still produce a modern smartphone with a large, easily removable battery (which isn't screwed or glued yet doesn't blow up when you drop the phone), and these guys can do it from their bedrooms, and these guys can make a device I've wanted for the last 15 years since my Psion 5 broke, with a non-glued battery*, why can't the behemoths of Apple, Samsung, Google, Motorola, Nokia etc.?
M.
*though, of course, I used to get a week of use from my 5mx using a pair of Alkaline AAs (yes, yes, it didn't have any always-on radios, but it's still quite a feat)
Ever disassemble something with a compressed spring, inadvertently set fire to flammable materials, be it fuel or food? Stored energy needs to be respected. As a kid I scraped out the fuel from a model rocket and got the match about 6 inches from the powder pile before a flash of heat and light passed my face, luckily with no lasting ill effect other than a greater appreciation for stored energy.
Energy doesn't HAVE to go somewhere. There are designs for solid state lithium batteries that can be stabbed repeatedly and not only not blow up or catch on fire, but continue operating (at a reduced capacity) but the trick is making them keep the other characteristics of their more flammable cousins from capacity to charge time to manufacturing cost. It is being worked on, but unfortunately they aren't there yet.
There are "designs" for endless safe clean energy from a glass of water, aka the miracle of Cold Fusion. And if you go on YouTube, or as I prefer to call it, U-Bend, you will find hundreds of "designs" for perpetual motion machines, zero-point energy devices, and the like. The snag of course is that they are just there for clickbait and none of them work.
Solid-state batteries are only marginally more feasible than cold fusion. They sometimes 'work', for the purposes of swindling some clueless investors out of a big pile of cash, but they don't work in real life. They have piss-poor power density, extreme manufacturing challenges, and non-existent longevity.
Usually the fundamental problem is the lithium needs to be made near atomically flat with a PVD machine, but when it dissolves and plates back again, it doesn't plate flat and the electrode separates from its solid electrolyte. The available power and energy plummet with each charge, especially if it's a fast charge.
The main reason why solid state batteries are slightly safer, is because their power density is MUCH lower i.e. they have a high internal resistance. So you're not really comparing apples with apples if you compare the safety of a lipo battery that can be charged in an hour, with a solid state battery that is damaged beyond repair if you charge it more quickly than 10 hours..
There's really no such thing as a high power density, high energy density, scalable energy store that is also safe. Storing high energy reagents in the same place.. There's a word for that: a bomb.
By "designs" I mean they are practical working parts. You can stab them repeatedly and the battery does not catch fire and keeps working.
Unfortunately it also create dendrites on steroids, so it has a rather short cycle life, which needs to be addressed before it can replace what we're using today.
So comparing it to "perpetual motion machines" is just demonstrating how ignorant you are of state of the art battery research. And the guy working on what I mention above is who originally invented the lithium ion battery, so he's not some sort of cold fusion crank.
Actually there is, which is the aluminum graphene battery. It has 3 times the density of lipo, the ability to go from 0 percent to 100 percent charge, can be recharged over 7000 times with only a 1 prercent degradation, and has none of the thermal runaway problems of lithium. Oh, and best part, the battery can be charged from 0 percent to 100 percent in just 10 minutes if your charging infrastructure is up to the task. The company that came up with it is building a factory to produce them now, and they plan to produce EV pouch batteries. Once they start showing up in caes, I'll take getting an EV seriously.
Well, it does look interesting, and the Australian startup linked to the University of Queensland is building 'pouch' cells - "In the energy storage segment GMG and the University of Queensland are working collaboratively with financial support from the Australian Government to progress research and development, and ultimately explore the commercialization of GMG graphene aluminium-ion batteries."
Grapheme Manufacturing Group: Aluminium-Ion Battery
GMG commissions G+AI pouch cell equipment and manufactures the first pouch cell batteries
And a paper going into more details about aluminium-graphene cell properties:
(Science Advances is the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) open access multidisciplinary journal)
So it looks a bit less scammy and blue-sky than many other 'upcoming' technologies. The challenge, as always, is going from the lab to small scale production, then to mass production. Lots of things that look wonderful when cherry-picked and cosseted in the lab simply don't scale well, or fail in the 'real word' with cycling temperature, vibration (especially in cars), and humidity, or not enough improvement in costs to displace a current technology and its supply chain. So I'm not celebrating yet.
Yeah, looks very promising. We (not the company we, I'm only a very interested spectator) should know something on whether this is going to be of value in the next year. I really hope it does work, because it'll solve a lot of the current problems with the EV. The only problem left to solve will be generating the power to begin with, because sunshine and unicorn farts are nowhere near able to generate that much power at our current tech level.
It's good to see that we're developing interesting and useful technologies for batteries. There's lots of places (phones, cars, laptops, and a zillion other applications) that could use a really good, long-lasting battery.
Unfortunately, in pretty much every application, they're skipping the comparatively cheap and easy steps of making the battery easily replaced. Which would make the lifespan of the item tremendously longer and that makes it not only more user friendly, but more environmentally freindly as well.
Sort of. It's true that high energy density and safety are always conflicting requirements, but there isn't a hard limit that we know of. Perpetual motion, or energy from water, OTOH, are outright impossible. These things should not be lumped in the same bucket. Claims about innovative batteries need to be looked at with healthy skepticism; claims about perpetual motion don't even need to be looked at.
Yeah - one of my early jobs was as a trainee TV repair technician. Working with Cathode Ray Tubes taught you to respect that 12-15kV (black and white TVs) and up to 26kV for colour TVs.
One senior technician once got zapped with around 25kV between his little finger and his wrist. The muscle between the two stood to attention for several long minutes and he was feeling a tad unwell for a couple of hours afterwards. He certainly didn't do THAT again in a hurry! As this was back in the early 1970s I'm not even sure if we had proper accident report books back then. It was just one of the hazards of the job though it was drilled into us that you NEVER had both hands inside the back of a live TV while fault finding.
I'm glad modern stuff doesn't have any of those high voltage tubes in it to worry about. You can get shocked by 120v in the US all day and it doesn't even hurt let alone cause any lasting damage. Yeah yeah I know theoretically it can kill you, but you'd probably have to be standing barefoot in ankle deep water with wet hands, firmly grasp conductors in either hand, and have a bad heart.
I'll bite. If you firmly grasp conductors with damp hands, it doesn't matter where you are standing - the current will go across your heart anyway.
However, 120V American electrickery kills a lot more people than the nice safe 220V European stuff. The trouble is you have decreased the risk of electrocution at the cost of increasing the risk of fire - and that is a bad trade; most people killed by electrical faults die from smoke inhalation.
(At this point, defenders of the American system point to 110V site tools in the UK: Building sites have a much higher risk of cables being damaged, and a much lower chance of people sleeping in them overnight, and so dying in the fire in their sleep.)
Yup. 110V site tools also operate off transformers that have a centre-tapped earth. This means they have no 'neutral', both conductors are live with respect to earth, but at 'only' 55V RMS. Note that it is still AC, to 55V RMS gives you a peak voltage to earth of 55 x √2 = 78 volts.
Centre-tapped earth: if one phase shorts to earth, you blow a fuse.
Floating: if one phase shorts to earth, nothing stops but you have a big potential between earth and the other side. Chances are high that the operator will be earthed, so the risk to them is significant.
Not to defend, but I thought 220 was more likely to cause your body to violently spasm, causing you to pull away from the wiring while 120 was the sweet spot to keep you firmly in place while being fried.
I'm not afraid of my hearsay being wrong here, but this is what I've heard in the past.
The only problem I've ever had with the Eurovolt way is your running on 50hz. I can see the flicker on 50hz, particularly with flourescent tubes, and it tends to cause me to get headaches. 60hz is fast enough that I at least can't see the flicker. I lived in Germany for 3 years and my workplace there had the 4ft tubes.
My guess would be cheap LEDs with a crap power supply, or ones that are designed to be plug and play without bypassing a fluorescent ballast or halogen transformer.
I haven't ever seen any flicker when buying good quality stuff and rewiring fixtures so they can direct connect, but when you make compromises you have to accept the consequences.
My understanding from College Lectures (for some reason almost exclusively lectured by Ex UK Army engineers) is that AC will cause muscles to spasm giving you a chance of being thrown off the conductor, DC will cause muscles to clamp which if you where holding the wire could lead to cooking.
Apparently the difference between 110-115VAC and 200+VAC is down to human's natural electrical resistance, at voltages somewhere over 200 the current across the chest of an average human is usually enough to stop the heart, but there is a chance that the heart will restart itself after the shock and if not CPR can be performed normally.
At 110-115V the current across the heart is more likely to cause the heart to start fibrillating, which is very dangerous as the heart needs to be de-fibrillated before CPR can be commenced.
A digression: the lecturers also mentioned that Edison was 'loosing' a lot of linesmen to his DC network which he kept as quiet as possible while at the same time trying to prove how dangerous AC by ensuring the Electric chair was AC powered, I imagine watching the prisoner convulse is pretty horrifying.
One caveat: I've never done my own research into this, didn't end up pursuing a electrical career and it was a long time ago, so it is possible I have mis-remembered the lecture contents.
"You can get shocked by 120v in the US all day and it doesn't even hurt let alone cause any lasting damage."
This statement is quite true when compared to 220V. Yes, if you manage to get it across your heart, it can kill you - just like 220V. Unlike 220V, however, if you get it across other body parts, like fingers to elbow, it simply produces an unpleasant sensation and you can let go. Been there, done that; I've taken half a dozen 120V shocks with no injury. (Not "no major injury", but "there's no evidence anything happened".) Try that with 220V! It's not the voltage itself, but the total power delivered, and doubling the voltage (if the available current is the same) doubles the power and therefore damage.
I'm not finding anything conclusive saying that 120V is more likely to cause fires. The currents would be higher, but the spark distance is much lower; it's likely a wash.
Frankly, I've gotten rather tired of the whole "our power system is safer than those crazies on the other side of the pond" arguments - regardless of which viewpoint is being put forward. Electricity can be dangerous if mishandled, regardless of voltage (if provided with sufficient current). Both systems are probably about the same safety level, thanks to the electrical codes implemented for the respective voltage. Quit arguing about "mine's better".
My mate can grab a pulsing electric fence with no problems ... however that doesn't mean we're all stupid enough to test whether we have a high body resistance by shorting across the chest, whatever the voltage.
From my experience, 60V tingles, 120V ac hurts and can produce electrical burns but doesn't really cause clamping, 240V ac hurts a lot and does cause some clamping, and a low capacity 100kV dc jolt across the chest is a near-death experience.
Indeed. I managed to trap a dog leash in the car door (dog safely inside the car with me!) causing the actual cord to snap and the part without the clasp to retract into the handle on opening the door again.
As I was searching for "can you repair a flexi dog leash" and "flexi replacement parts", I saw Google trying to autosuggest "spring of death". Eventually I clicked one of those links and found a page with a guy trying to do more or less the same thing I was, with a lot of pictures documenting every step (not too far from an iFixit guide, actually) - ending abruptly with him encountering said spring. To quote his exact post: "Yikes!"
A five meter steel spiral torsion spring, tensed to within an Angstrom of its life, basically shot straight out of the casing as he prodded the center peg to see what was holding the cartridge with the cord in place. He wasn't injured according to the post, but it sure put me off even trying to perry the housing open.
I don't think that was a lead-acid battery, because there's nothing in lead-acid batteries that's very flammable. Damage to lead-acid batteries can cause a huge surge of current if the battery shorts out, and that can be very destructive, but they don't tend to burst into flame like lithium batteries can.
Yes. If you over-charge a lead-acid battery, it can start to electrolyse the water in the electrolyte (which is relatively dilute sulfuric* acid), producing hydrogen at the cathode, and oxygen at the anode. If the cell is sealed, the gas will build up pressure unless vented, either by design or by something splitting/breaking. This is why large UPS installations are well ventilated/vented** (and I think building codes in some places require panels designed to easily blow out without fundamental structural damage) - because a build up of hydrogen in an enclosed area has a non-zero risk of generating an unexpected explosion.
*No, this isn't isn't a manifestation of The Register house-style; IUPAC naming rules are that sulfur is written with an f, not ph.
Not just by overcharging. If you short circuit a charged lead acid battery (with something solid enough not to be vapourized immediately) the current flow is enough to boil the electrolyte, the resulting steam pressure will rupture the battery and spray boiling sulphuric acid around.
ISTR someone here, many years ago, relating a story whereby someone had dropped a big screwdriver or spanner and it landed across the contacts of a car battery. The initial sparks welded it to the contacts whereupon it glowed brighter and brighter until it melted and finally broke the circuit :-)
> ISTR someone here, many years ago, relating a story whereby someone had dropped a big screwdriver or spanner and it landed across the contacts of a car battery
Possibly me, though my experience was of dropping a spanner across the contacts of a 24v truck battery. There was a loud flash and bang. The spanner did not weld itself to the battery (it was kicked away too quickly by the bang or bounce). It did blow off the outer layer of the spanner though.
I don't know if dropping a spanner across a 12v battery would weld instead of bang. That's a question I'll leave to the experimentalists to answer.
As Phil said. I've firsthand experience with that situation. Blew a small fortune dumping large amounts of baking soda/water solution into the engine compartment. Metal radiator cap worked it's way loose and shorted the positive anode to ground...driving along minding my own business, about a mile from home, and there was this dull boom/thud from the front of the vehicle.
Nope. I had an IBM-rebranded APC with 4 of the standard 12v lead acid batteries inside.
I came home to a "funny smell" and smoke venting from a mostly melted plastic case. IBM paid for me to ship it to them and sent a FedEx pickup to my house with a special shipping container.
There was a nice big scorched spot in the carpet and I'm still using the desk with the scorch on the side.
Could be from a motorcycle as there are many li-po batteries around now to replace the lead acid. Meant to have far better life and recovery, so my next replacement will be one.
At least on my bike the battery is well hidden from the externals so no risk of a loose object flicking up from the road and uncturing it
The rated capacity of a LiPo is for electrical storage but it's not yet at full energy capacity. Charge it with no protection circuit. There's no heat, no puffing, just soaking up the charge. The true 100% is revealed when the battery suddenly explodes and the metal plates burn.
(I've read that this is lithium electrolysis - a very bad thing)
Good evening. This is your Captain
We are about to attempt a crash landing
Please extinguish all cigarettes
Place your tray tables in their
Upright, locked position
Your Captain says: Put your head on your knees
Your Captain says: Put your head in your hands
Captain says: Put your hands on your head
Put your hands on your hips. Heh, heh
This is your Captain – and we are going down
We are all going down, together
And I said: Uh oh. This is gonna be some day
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