What causes laptop batteries to overheat? - lithium ion battery manufacturers
In the summer of 2006, Dell and Apple, together with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), announced a massive recall of laptop batteries, followed by Toshiba and Lenovo.
Sony made all the recalled batteries, and on October 2006, the company announced its own large batteryscale recall.
In appropriate cases, these batteries may overheat and may cause burns, explosions or fires.
To understand why this is happening, it would be helpful to know a little bit about how the battery works.
The battery has terminals with negative power and terminals with positive power.
In the battery, the energy from the electrochemical reaction causes electrons (particles with negative electricity) to gather on the pole with negative electricity in the battery.
Charged particles are attracted to the opposite charge, so if you connect the battery to the circuit, the electrons will flow through the circuit from the negative pole and through the positive electrode of the battery.
In other words, the battery generates a moving charge, or electricity.
(See how electricity works and how the battery works for more details ).
The exact reaction to producing electrons varies depending on the type of battery. In a lithium-
Ion batteries, you will find pressurized containers with metal coils and flammable lithium
Contains liquid.
The manufacturing process produces tiny pieces of metal floating in the liquid.
Manufacturers cannot completely prevent these pieces of metal, but good manufacturing techniques limit their size and quantity.
Lithium battery-
The ion battery also contains separators that keep the anode and cathode or positive and negative poles out of contact.
If the battery gets hot by using it or charging it, the metal sheet moves around like the rice grains in the pan.
If a piece of metal is too close to the separator, it will pierce the separator and cause a short circuit.
In the case of short circuit, there are some possible situations that can go wrong: in the past few years, there are several reasons for recalling multiple laptop battery models.
People want small and light laptops that can be used for a long time.
They also want the laptop to have a bright screen and powerful processing power.
Laptop batteries must be relatively small for these reasons, but they must also maintain a lot of energy and last for a long time.
Make lithium-
Ion batteries capable of maintaining greater power over a longer period of time require small and thin important components, including separators.
The reduction in size makes it more likely that the battery will fail, break, leak or short circuit.
Check out the next page for more information, including how to determine if the recall will affect your laptop.