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Since I have a bit of experience in the world of batteries I thought I'd post. First of all, deflected electrodes, insufficient insulation tape, and high weldi

Since I have a bit of experience in the world of batteries I thought I'd post. First of all, deflected electrodes, insufficient insulation tape, and high welding burrs are absolutely fine explanations for what happened here. As someone who works with batteries, that would tell me everything I wanted to know. If I was running a battery fab, I'd be able to check for these problems in 20 minutes. Further in the favor of Samsung is that battery fabs are some of the most opaque places in the world. They never release any information of any value whatsoever to the outside, and there are only a handful in the world. For Samsung to release something like this so candidly is absolutely unprecedented in the world of batteries; I was shocked when I saw the post. Say what you will about Samsung in general, or about their treatment of the whole process, but posting this is a first among any of the major battery manufacturers and shocked me with its level of openness and detail. ------------------- If anyone doubts this, try getting information on the closest battery fab to you. You can try to find what batteries they produce, but chances are that's not public. You can try to find their name, or if they still exist, but that's probably also not public. You might eventually find an address, and you might go there, but when you arrive you'll be forcibly removed from the area by armed security and/or police. To give an example, there are a couple debates in the industry about what company acquired another company. It's years after the supposed acquisition, and nobody knows anything. The battery industry is a whole secretive world of its own, and this is because batteries are simultaneously a low-profit commodity and a gateway to unlimited riches. If Apple is successful with its dream technology, it might capture 50% of the world smartphone market instead of the 14% it has now. If a battery company is successful, it will become successful beyond your wildest dreams. Lots of things are just on the edge of being possible with today's battery tech. The first one to 'win' gets to go from selling a couple billion of batteries (to small fish, like EV and power tool makers) to selling trillions of dollars to everyone that will buy, including every electric utility in the world that will be ecstatic to have the perfect demand-smoothing device.

logicallee 10y ago
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. Slightly off-topic, but perhaps interesting enough to keep here: You state that battery fabs are very opaque. Could you tell us some things we might be surprised to learn about battery manufacturing or technology in general? Thank you.
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  You're welcome! Unfortunately, I'm mostly on the supply side of the battery equation, consuming those few PDFs that are smuggled out. The most surprising thing, to me, is that battery tech moves in a zig-zag shape. The best battery that money can buy, for two of pretty much the most important applications (can't elaborate further, sorry) was only made from ~2012 until ~2014. A lot of really expensive things that need that battery are now running off of old stock, which will of course eventually run out. The best comparable battery made in 2016 has less than half its performance. Another example of this is energy density. For practical purposes, the best density you could reasonably buy was fixed around 90 Wh/kg for a while (until about 1997), then suddenly jumped to ~180 Wh/kg (~2002), then went in 2006 to ~260 Wh/kg... and sat there, where it has sat for eleven years now with practically zero improvement. [0] If I teleported to today from 2006 I'd expect to have some fantastic 400 Wh/kg batteries that would enable all kinds of new technologies... but nope, the best energy density you can get is literally the same as it was eleven years ago. Worth noting that since 2006 discharge rates of high capacity batteries have gone up, to be perfectly fair. Still though, energy density remains stagnant. [0] Looking at graphs on Google Images will give you the wrong idea. They typically show the best batteries that year, not necessarily ones you can actually buy, and the numbers are often pulled out of thin air. This graph [1] is the least worst, but that's not saying much. [1] http://media.greenmonk.net/greenmonk/files/2015/11/Li-IonDensity.jpg http://media.greenmonk.net/greenmonk/files/2015/11/Li-IonDen...
  - deepGem 10y ago
    Thanks for posting this. A totally unrelated question, if you don't mind answering. Given all this, do you believe that Tesla is changing the battery market dynamics with their GigaFactory. Musk has claimed that their plan is to increase the energy density, but hasn't given out any specifics.
    - nolok 10y ago
      Not parent, but whatever their plan is, energy density is limited by the technology, not the will. It's not like Panasonic could manufacture battery with twice the energy density if they wanted to, with some tech they're hiding in their back pocket. As for the "gigafactory", it's Tesla trying to get into that closed market, like parent said there are only a few big players and it's not very welcoming to new ones, Tesla's plan is to be so big that they can have a big supply to sell in bulk AND to also be (together with solar city I guess) one of their first big scale customer.
xenadu02 10y ago
My question is why wasn't their QA process catching this in the factory? Especially after the first recall. It seems like they didn't bother making a special effort to verify the second battery source was producing good batteries. (I honestly have no idea, I'm not involved in manufacturing.)
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  Samsung SDI is separate enough from the smartphone makers that I'd guess it just wasn't prioritized as much as it should have been. 2.5 million phones were sold, at 14 watt hours per battery that means that the Note 7 batteries would only be a few percent of their total production (35 MWh of Note 7 batteries produced.) Catching problems like this can be pretty tricky and at the end of the day it's also possible that a few people getting lazy and programming the machines wrong led to this.
- bluetwo 10y ago
  I agree. They didn't talk at all about any QA processes that should have or would have caught issues, or what they have instituted since.
- kurthr 10y ago
  It's worth noting that the number of actual failures is measurable only after millions had shipped. 10-100 dppm is a reasonable guess (~100 phones out of 2.7M shipped) with relatively low "infant mortality" until they were compressed into a phone and used (and abused as normal). As a tester, you build a 10k ($10M) unit test run and none of them fail, and then another 10k ($10M) run and again none of them fail... statistically you might not expect reliably catch a single failure until you run 10 times.... that's a $100M test you need to get your boss to sign off on. Note that when you get a failure it will burn up and you won't be able to identify the cause. Now, if you knew the failure mode, you could test for it directly and you wouldn't have to waste an entire assembled phone in a destructive evaluation, but that's hind sight. The failure defects they see seem like pretty standard problems, but other than sampling, I'm still not sure how they are going to catch them in manufacturing. What's amazing is that more batteries don't go up (the original Prius was notorious).
kriro 10y ago
Thanks for the post, interesting information. I know nothing about the battery market but wouldn't it make sense for big players like Samsung to buy into that part of the supply chain if it's in the state you describe?
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  You're welcome! And they do. The big battery makers are Panasonic, LG Chem, Samsung SDI, and a few companies that make things internally. Apple has tried to get into batteries with a few strategic acquisitions but didn't really get anywhere (as far as we know.)
annnnd 10y ago
Thank for the insights! I think the damage Samsung suffered was simply too high, so they had to release information that would show that they really solved the issue. Otherwise there would be permanent brand damage if people suspected that they don't know what was causing incidents. So what we are seeing is actually some very well thought out PR.
- roddux 10y ago
  Seconded with the "well thought out PR" part. The piece was worded well, all fault points away from Samsung.
  - martin-adams 10y ago
    I would be curious to see how they would have handled the PR if Samsung were at fault. I would like to think the exact same.
    - mcguire 10y ago
      The original batteries were manufactured by a Samsung subsidiary.
    - rasz_pl 10y ago
      you misunderstood, which means Samsung misinformation worked rather well. The FULL blame is on Samsung and its subsidiaries.
    - blktiger 10y ago
      Seeing as how Samsung did produce the original faulty batteries, you are seeing exactly how they shift the blame away from themselves. Instead of calling out the bad batteries they made, the specifically avoid discussing who made the bad batteries so it looks like they did a lot of investigation into the cause but it doesn't look like they were at fault.
blauditore 10y ago
I understand that some technology is kept secret for competitive reasons, but it seems to me that what is shown here (composition of batteries) could also be found out by simply opening one, of course assuming a somewhat expert is doing it. Or is there something preventing this? On the other hand, revealing causes of failure seems much more specific and valueable, so there's that.
- Zak 10y ago
  The basic structure of Li-ion batteries is well known and not really different between manufacturers and physical configurations (e.g. cylindrical versus pouch cells). What's significant is the details. The exact chemical compositions and dimensions of the different components result in significantly different performance characteristics.
- nolok 10y ago
  A relatively small number of batteries had the issues. The one we knew for sure had, well, burned or exploded.
jnsaff2 10y ago
I was lucky to pick up German as a teenager. This episode of Omega Tau (german only) has an amazing discussion about batteries. http://omegataupodcast.net/222-batterien/ http://omegataupodcast.net/222-batterien/
- finid 10y ago
  So can you translate the VIP bits to us that don't speak or understand German?
mtgx 10y ago
So was this a design problem with the batteries or an engineering one? Or both? Did the fact that they tried to pack the battery as tightly in as possible contribute to those flaws?
- MikusR 10y ago
  The phones that have nonfaulty batteries do not explode.
- Zak 10y ago
  This was mainly a QC problem. Batteries were produced with an unusual rate of defects that resulted in internal short circuits. Cramming the battery in to the smallest space possible may have exacerbated those defects, but batteries for consumer applications should not be so fragile that moderate pressure on their shells causes them to explode.
- ape4 10y ago
  Maybe the designed tolerances were too close. ie they design something that could not be reliably made.
iplaw 10y ago
"I was shocked when I saw the post." Are you still using a Samsung Galaxy Note7?
cordite 10y ago
If the battery industry is so secretive, how do you find out where jobs are?
- gedrap 10y ago
  Jobs find you, probably.
  - dhruvmittal 10y ago
    Can confirm. My MA research was on an EMD Li-ion cathode material and I get approached by recruiters for companies I haven't even heard of every so often.
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  I'm not actually working with batteries right now, but as I posted on an earlier HN thread [0] I'm a generalist, and typically when a company hires me one of the first things I do is help them with batteries. Pretty much any company that uses batteries these days can really benefit from my help (for example, reducing the battery cost from $20/battery to $6/battery, or bringing the capacity, given the same space and weight, from 2800mAh to 7000mAh.) Regarding how people specifically hire me, I've been lucky enough to never really need to search for work; it just finds me. Either through HN, or from people I've worked for before. By the way, my email's in my profile; anyone in this thread feel free to contact me. You should especially contact me if you're involved in any project that uses batteries, I always love to hear what people are making. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13410359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13410359
  - john_k 10y ago
    Do you have any details or examples of your battery work? Those battery numbers almost sound like switching someone from older battery chemistry to a lithium based formula.
    - owenversteeg 10y ago
skykooler 10y ago
Why are EVs considered small fish? Sure, they might have a minority of the car market, but they also have thousands of times the battery capacity of a laptop or a smartphone.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  think of the sheer number of applications for batteries then just mass alone of all those supported devices should give a clue. while many longer range EVs will have 400kg or of batteries their numbers just aren't sufficient to matter; yet.
  - Cthulhu_ 10y ago
    And yet, the battery production capacity is apparently nowhere near enough to supply companies like Tesla, making them become a battery manufacturer themselves. Which plays right into the parent comment - the battery business is huge, and Tesla could probably pivot from a car company to a battery / energy company easily enough. They kickstarted electric cars, the established companies are trying to catch up, but are doing so in part thanks to Tesla, their open patents, and soon enough, their hugely scaled battery manufacturing capacity.
    - Guvante 10y ago
      > the battery production capacity is apparently nowhere near enough to supply companies like Tesla All conjecture, but it could have just been a risk thing, not a capacity thing. Tesla isn't a problem, it is Tesla's ambitions that are a problem. There is sufficient supply for the Model S/X but not the Model 3 and they were likely having difficulty finding a partner willing to spin up enough production capacity for the later. If I were to hazard a guess everyone wasn't willing to take on the risk at the usual price so there was enough price difference (to cover the risk of problems) that it made sense for Tesla to spend the capital to build there own. Heck you might even be able base Tesla's expanding ideas of what to do with batteries on this. "What do we do if we can't sell the cars at the expected price point so we move fewer of them?" "Just make other products that can shore up demand". Again all baseless conjecture but depending on the quantities involved could make sense. If Tesla said "I guarantee I will by X but you need to be able to produce 5X in case I don't run into any issues" would you bite without compensation for that risk?
skywhopper 10y ago
I'm definitely glad they posted it. It's interesting to see what factors contributed to the failures. However, I doubt Samsung published this out of the goodness of their hearts. I would be surprised if publishing this was not a requirement of some consent agreement with the US FTC or some other regulatory body.
creativityland 10y ago
I'm also surprised by the level of transparency here. The Galaxy Note 7 warning signs are at every major airport I've visited recently, the damage is done. Hope to see them recover in the coming years.
chiph 10y ago
Story time. Dad worked briefly for the Eveready battery division of Union Carbide, and they had a plant in low-labor-cost (for the time) Asheboro North Carolina. They had a problem with their then-new alkaline battery line where the batteries were exploding, and dad (a chemical engineer) was sent to find out why and fix it. He was there for several weeks looking over the process and line, trying various things to solve the problem. Eventually his boss came for a visit and dad was explaining what he had done as they walked through the factory floor. Just as they passed a stack of batteries, one of them exploded -- which then set off a chain reaction as the released electrolyte shorted out adjacent batteries. Listening to this series of small explosions, his boss accused him of a setup. Nope. Just coincidence. I think he said the problem was traced to the water supply and how the city had been varying the amount of chlorine in it. The most interesting battery they made was for the Union Pacific Railroad. They had signal lights to run out in the middle of nowhere, and they had to run unattended through the Rocky Mountain winters. So they made this massive battery that would be hoisted by crane into a buried vault by the side of the tracks, to be swapped out 5-6 months later.
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  Wouldn't signal lights require a network to coordinate? That would mean there's some kind of connection to it, so why would it need a battery?
  - foota 10y ago
    I believe trains would flip switches as they rode along the rail.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - chiph 10y ago
    More than likely it used Automatic Block Signaling, invented in the late 19th century. Train detection is done by looking for the electrical leakage across the rails through the steel wheels & axles of the train. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_block_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_block_signaling It can't handle as many trains as centralized control, but it has the advantage of not needing a network in remote areas - just buried wires. It's the equivalent to relay logic. (I finally get to put some of my teenage model railroading knowledge to work)
draw_down 10y ago
People had these devices explode and planes had to land due to them, I'd say some candor is in order.
nomel 10y ago
> They never release any information of any value whatsoever to the outside, and there are only a handful in the world Technical explanations are fine, but catching potential problems like that is why QA, and locking processes, exists, on the shipping and receiving end. Ideally, there be a sampling and analysis of the batteries, for a specific process, for a specific plant, before accepting them at the factory. Xray imaging, mechanical stress testing, accelerated life testing, etc. Sealing that many flawed component in your phones isn't the result of battery manufacturing opaqueness, it's a test escape for QA. Something went wrong. An incorrect sample size from an incorrect confidence, a process change at the battery end, without resampling, or ignoring or not readjusting the confidence after seeing failures. Otherwise, you know, phones could blow up in people pockets and be a PR disaster for your company, because customers only see the name on the case.

logicallee 10y ago

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. Slightly off-topic, but perhaps interesting enough to keep here: You state that battery fabs are very opaque. Could you tell us some things we might be surprised to learn about battery manufacturing or technology in general? Thank you.

owenversteeg 10y ago
You're welcome! Unfortunately, I'm mostly on the supply side of the battery equation, consuming those few PDFs that are smuggled out. The most surprising thing, to me, is that battery tech moves in a zig-zag shape. The best battery that money can buy, for two of pretty much the most important applications (can't elaborate further, sorry) was only made from ~2012 until ~2014. A lot of really expensive things that need that battery are now running off of old stock, which will of course eventually run out. The best comparable battery made in 2016 has less than half its performance. Another example of this is energy density. For practical purposes, the best density you could reasonably buy was fixed around 90 Wh/kg for a while (until about 1997), then suddenly jumped to ~180 Wh/kg (~2002), then went in 2006 to ~260 Wh/kg... and sat there, where it has sat for eleven years now with practically zero improvement. [0] If I teleported to today from 2006 I'd expect to have some fantastic 400 Wh/kg batteries that would enable all kinds of new technologies... but nope, the best energy density you can get is literally the same as it was eleven years ago. Worth noting that since 2006 discharge rates of high capacity batteries have gone up, to be perfectly fair. Still though, energy density remains stagnant. [0] Looking at graphs on Google Images will give you the wrong idea. They typically show the best batteries that year, not necessarily ones you can actually buy, and the numbers are often pulled out of thin air. This graph [1] is the least worst, but that's not saying much. [1] http://media.greenmonk.net/greenmonk/files/2015/11/Li-IonDensity.jpg http://media.greenmonk.net/greenmonk/files/2015/11/Li-IonDen...
- deepGem 10y ago
  Thanks for posting this. A totally unrelated question, if you don't mind answering. Given all this, do you believe that Tesla is changing the battery market dynamics with their GigaFactory. Musk has claimed that their plan is to increase the energy density, but hasn't given out any specifics.
  - nolok 10y ago
    Not parent, but whatever their plan is, energy density is limited by the technology, not the will. It's not like Panasonic could manufacture battery with twice the energy density if they wanted to, with some tech they're hiding in their back pocket. As for the "gigafactory", it's Tesla trying to get into that closed market, like parent said there are only a few big players and it's not very welcoming to new ones, Tesla's plan is to be so big that they can have a big supply to sell in bulk AND to also be (together with solar city I guess) one of their first big scale customer.

xenadu02 10y ago

My question is why wasn't their QA process catching this in the factory? Especially after the first recall. It seems like they didn't bother making a special effort to verify the second battery source was producing good batteries. (I honestly have no idea, I'm not involved in manufacturing.)

owenversteeg 10y ago
Samsung SDI is separate enough from the smartphone makers that I'd guess it just wasn't prioritized as much as it should have been. 2.5 million phones were sold, at 14 watt hours per battery that means that the Note 7 batteries would only be a few percent of their total production (35 MWh of Note 7 batteries produced.) Catching problems like this can be pretty tricky and at the end of the day it's also possible that a few people getting lazy and programming the machines wrong led to this.
bluetwo 10y ago
I agree. They didn't talk at all about any QA processes that should have or would have caught issues, or what they have instituted since.
kurthr 10y ago
It's worth noting that the number of actual failures is measurable only after millions had shipped. 10-100 dppm is a reasonable guess (~100 phones out of 2.7M shipped) with relatively low "infant mortality" until they were compressed into a phone and used (and abused as normal). As a tester, you build a 10k ($10M) unit test run and none of them fail, and then another 10k ($10M) run and again none of them fail... statistically you might not expect reliably catch a single failure until you run 10 times.... that's a $100M test you need to get your boss to sign off on. Note that when you get a failure it will burn up and you won't be able to identify the cause. Now, if you knew the failure mode, you could test for it directly and you wouldn't have to waste an entire assembled phone in a destructive evaluation, but that's hind sight. The failure defects they see seem like pretty standard problems, but other than sampling, I'm still not sure how they are going to catch them in manufacturing. What's amazing is that more batteries don't go up (the original Prius was notorious).

kriro 10y ago

Thanks for the post, interesting information. I know nothing about the battery market but wouldn't it make sense for big players like Samsung to buy into that part of the supply chain if it's in the state you describe?

owenversteeg 10y ago
You're welcome! And they do. The big battery makers are Panasonic, LG Chem, Samsung SDI, and a few companies that make things internally. Apple has tried to get into batteries with a few strategic acquisitions but didn't really get anywhere (as far as we know.)

annnnd 10y ago

Thank for the insights! I think the damage Samsung suffered was simply too high, so they had to release information that would show that they really solved the issue. Otherwise there would be permanent brand damage if people suspected that they don't know what was causing incidents. So what we are seeing is actually some very well thought out PR.

roddux 10y ago
Seconded with the "well thought out PR" part. The piece was worded well, all fault points away from Samsung.
- martin-adams 10y ago
  I would be curious to see how they would have handled the PR if Samsung were at fault. I would like to think the exact same.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    The original batteries were manufactured by a Samsung subsidiary.
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    you misunderstood, which means Samsung misinformation worked rather well. The FULL blame is on Samsung and its subsidiaries.
  - blktiger 10y ago
    Seeing as how Samsung did produce the original faulty batteries, you are seeing exactly how they shift the blame away from themselves. Instead of calling out the bad batteries they made, the specifically avoid discussing who made the bad batteries so it looks like they did a lot of investigation into the cause but it doesn't look like they were at fault.

blauditore 10y ago

I understand that some technology is kept secret for competitive reasons, but it seems to me that what is shown here (composition of batteries) could also be found out by simply opening one, of course assuming a somewhat expert is doing it. Or is there something preventing this? On the other hand, revealing causes of failure seems much more specific and valueable, so there's that.

Zak 10y ago
The basic structure of Li-ion batteries is well known and not really different between manufacturers and physical configurations (e.g. cylindrical versus pouch cells). What's significant is the details. The exact chemical compositions and dimensions of the different components result in significantly different performance characteristics.
nolok 10y ago
A relatively small number of batteries had the issues. The one we knew for sure had, well, burned or exploded.

jnsaff2 10y ago

I was lucky to pick up German as a teenager. This episode of Omega Tau (german only) has an amazing discussion about batteries. http://omegataupodcast.net/222-batterien/ http://omegataupodcast.net/222-batterien/

finid 10y ago
So can you translate the VIP bits to us that don't speak or understand German?

mtgx 10y ago

So was this a design problem with the batteries or an engineering one? Or both? Did the fact that they tried to pack the battery as tightly in as possible contribute to those flaws?

MikusR 10y ago
The phones that have nonfaulty batteries do not explode.
Zak 10y ago
This was mainly a QC problem. Batteries were produced with an unusual rate of defects that resulted in internal short circuits. Cramming the battery in to the smallest space possible may have exacerbated those defects, but batteries for consumer applications should not be so fragile that moderate pressure on their shells causes them to explode.
ape4 10y ago
Maybe the designed tolerances were too close. ie they design something that could not be reliably made.

iplaw 10y ago

"I was shocked when I saw the post." Are you still using a Samsung Galaxy Note7?

cordite 10y ago

If the battery industry is so secretive, how do you find out where jobs are?

gedrap 10y ago
Jobs find you, probably.
- dhruvmittal 10y ago
  Can confirm. My MA research was on an EMD Li-ion cathode material and I get approached by recruiters for companies I haven't even heard of every so often.
owenversteeg 10y ago
I'm not actually working with batteries right now, but as I posted on an earlier HN thread [0] I'm a generalist, and typically when a company hires me one of the first things I do is help them with batteries. Pretty much any company that uses batteries these days can really benefit from my help (for example, reducing the battery cost from $20/battery to $6/battery, or bringing the capacity, given the same space and weight, from 2800mAh to 7000mAh.) Regarding how people specifically hire me, I've been lucky enough to never really need to search for work; it just finds me. Either through HN, or from people I've worked for before. By the way, my email's in my profile; anyone in this thread feel free to contact me. You should especially contact me if you're involved in any project that uses batteries, I always love to hear what people are making. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13410359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13410359
- john_k 10y ago
  Do you have any details or examples of your battery work? Those battery numbers almost sound like switching someone from older battery chemistry to a lithium based formula.
  - owenversteeg 10y ago

skykooler 10y ago

Why are EVs considered small fish? Sure, they might have a minority of the car market, but they also have thousands of times the battery capacity of a laptop or a smartphone.

Shivetya 10y ago
think of the sheer number of applications for batteries then just mass alone of all those supported devices should give a clue. while many longer range EVs will have 400kg or of batteries their numbers just aren't sufficient to matter; yet.
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  And yet, the battery production capacity is apparently nowhere near enough to supply companies like Tesla, making them become a battery manufacturer themselves. Which plays right into the parent comment - the battery business is huge, and Tesla could probably pivot from a car company to a battery / energy company easily enough. They kickstarted electric cars, the established companies are trying to catch up, but are doing so in part thanks to Tesla, their open patents, and soon enough, their hugely scaled battery manufacturing capacity.
  - Guvante 10y ago
    > the battery production capacity is apparently nowhere near enough to supply companies like Tesla All conjecture, but it could have just been a risk thing, not a capacity thing. Tesla isn't a problem, it is Tesla's ambitions that are a problem. There is sufficient supply for the Model S/X but not the Model 3 and they were likely having difficulty finding a partner willing to spin up enough production capacity for the later. If I were to hazard a guess everyone wasn't willing to take on the risk at the usual price so there was enough price difference (to cover the risk of problems) that it made sense for Tesla to spend the capital to build there own. Heck you might even be able base Tesla's expanding ideas of what to do with batteries on this. "What do we do if we can't sell the cars at the expected price point so we move fewer of them?" "Just make other products that can shore up demand". Again all baseless conjecture but depending on the quantities involved could make sense. If Tesla said "I guarantee I will by X but you need to be able to produce 5X in case I don't run into any issues" would you bite without compensation for that risk?

skywhopper 10y ago

I'm definitely glad they posted it. It's interesting to see what factors contributed to the failures. However, I doubt Samsung published this out of the goodness of their hearts. I would be surprised if publishing this was not a requirement of some consent agreement with the US FTC or some other regulatory body.

creativityland 10y ago

I'm also surprised by the level of transparency here. The Galaxy Note 7 warning signs are at every major airport I've visited recently, the damage is done. Hope to see them recover in the coming years.

chiph 10y ago

Story time. Dad worked briefly for the Eveready battery division of Union Carbide, and they had a plant in low-labor-cost (for the time) Asheboro North Carolina. They had a problem with their then-new alkaline battery line where the batteries were exploding, and dad (a chemical engineer) was sent to find out why and fix it. He was there for several weeks looking over the process and line, trying various things to solve the problem. Eventually his boss came for a visit and dad was explaining what he had done as they walked through the factory floor. Just as they passed a stack of batteries, one of them exploded -- which then set off a chain reaction as the released electrolyte shorted out adjacent batteries. Listening to this series of small explosions, his boss accused him of a setup. Nope. Just coincidence. I think he said the problem was traced to the water supply and how the city had been varying the amount of chlorine in it. The most interesting battery they made was for the Union Pacific Railroad. They had signal lights to run out in the middle of nowhere, and they had to run unattended through the Rocky Mountain winters. So they made this massive battery that would be hoisted by crane into a buried vault by the side of the tracks, to be swapped out 5-6 months later.

colejohnson66 10y ago
Wouldn't signal lights require a network to coordinate? That would mean there's some kind of connection to it, so why would it need a battery?
- foota 10y ago
  I believe trains would flip switches as they rode along the rail.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- chiph 10y ago
  More than likely it used Automatic Block Signaling, invented in the late 19th century. Train detection is done by looking for the electrical leakage across the rails through the steel wheels & axles of the train. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_block_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_block_signaling It can't handle as many trains as centralized control, but it has the advantage of not needing a network in remote areas - just buried wires. It's the equivalent to relay logic. (I finally get to put some of my teenage model railroading knowledge to work)

draw_down 10y ago

People had these devices explode and planes had to land due to them, I'd say some candor is in order.

nomel 10y ago

> They never release any information of any value whatsoever to the outside, and there are only a handful in the world Technical explanations are fine, but catching potential problems like that is why QA, and locking processes, exists, on the shipping and receiving end. Ideally, there be a sampling and analysis of the batteries, for a specific process, for a specific plant, before accepting them at the factory. Xray imaging, mechanical stress testing, accelerated life testing, etc. Sealing that many flawed component in your phones isn't the result of battery manufacturing opaqueness, it's a test escape for QA. Something went wrong. An incorrect sample size from an incorrect confidence, a process change at the battery end, without resampling, or ignoring or not readjusting the confidence after seeing failures. Otherwise, you know, phones could blow up in people pockets and be a PR disaster for your company, because customers only see the name on the case.