What Is The Process For Determining Responsibility When A Mobile Phone Battery Catastrophically Fails?
In light of the prevalence of smartphone battery explosions, determining responsibility between the user and the battery manufacturer is a complex process. Despite this, companies often tend to shift the blame onto the end users. However, is there a scientific method to accurately ascertain the true culprit?
We asked this question at the University of Warwick’s Energy Innovation Centre, and got to grips with the basics of battery forensics. “That’s part of the puzzle. When we get a damaged battery (or what’s left of it) into forensics, it’s our job to work backwards to understand the likely cause of the failure. As part of our work, we do a lot of battery testing, where we intentionally cause a failure and then collect evidence. Now for forensics we simply compare the damaged battery to a specific display to understand the likely cause,” the University of Warwick researcher explained.
Simply put, at a battery testing center, experts purposely overcharge, discharge, or damage a battery causing it to explode in order to collect evidence of debris. Now, when a test sample is sent, they look for similar evidence to determine the cause. So there are different signs of water damage, overcharging, high current consumption, or a burst battery, and testers simply match the type of damage on a case-by-case basis.
The researcher said that the main cause of battery explosion is overcharging and using high voltage current to replace lower capacity batteries. Interestingly, the researcher also mentioned that it is not always possible to determine the cause of a battery failure because sometimes there really isn’t much left of the battery after it explodes. The process of guessing the exact cause is therefore difficult, time-consuming, and the equipment needed for battery testing is very expensive.
No smartphone brand ever talks about battery testing publicly because most of them source their batteries from other vendors. This makes it easier for smartphone brands to shift the blame to consumers and cite “battery overcharging” as the likely cause.
