An Incident Waiting To Happen
by Paul McGoldrick
We have all become a little blasé about the energy stored in our portable appliances. Even in the humble little Palm we have enough energy to start a good fire and, potentially, it could be re-engineered into a weapon as a first-stage trigger. So it wasn't really that surprising when the news came in that on August 19, 2003 a woman was injured when her cell phone exploded (some reports said "burst into flames") and caused her injuries. This happened in a music store called Flame on the fashionable Kalverstraat in Amsterdam. The stories reported agreed that the woman dropped her GSM phone, which turned off on hitting the ground. The "explosion" occurred when the woman turned the phone back on and put it up to her ear.
One has to assume that the phone dropping caused a short-circuit across the battery terminals activated when the power switch was turned on. As many of us who study the IC products that go into them know, there are so many safety measures included with portable batteries that is difficult to see how that could happen. But Nokia reported earlier this year that there have been cases where batteries have overheated, melted, exploded and damaged both the battery and the phone. In each case, they said, the phone was being operated with a battery that was not original equipment. The lady in this incident told a worker in the store, one Jan Willem van Hofwegen that she was using a replacement battery.
So what we are hearing is that there is a rogue market out there supplying battery replacements without even the basic safety features of preventing overheating with a short circuit? It is difficult to believe that anybody, let alone groups of people, are willing to put people in danger in order to save a dollar or two, but it's probably just stupidity: Companies buying cells on the cheap and making their own battery packs to be the same size as the OEM parts not knowing that is not the end of the manufacturing story.
So far these bum batteries have only been found in Europe, Asia, and Africa -- and presumably they originate from Asia -- but here in the US we obviously should be keeping our eyes open for replacement batteries that are too cheap, unmarked, or look shoddily finished. Even if you were fortunate to escape the burns that the woman in Amsterdam suffered (she was treated on the spot by an ambulance crew) we would have to assume that if basic short-circuit protection has not been adopted by these stupid assemblers then they will also have neglected protections against over-charging and over-temperature shut-offs.
It has also been suggested that there is a rogue market in replacement chargers for portable appliance batteries. These are as scary as shoddy replacement parts for airplanes, in their own way.
My laptop is suffering from a charging glitch caused by a poor control IC design (which I have to sinfully admit I have reviewed for one of our larger vendors) and I was about to look around for a replacement battery pack. If that happens I will certainly not purchase it without seeing the original Panasonic name on the outside.
But at least the Nokia user in Amsterdam was able to go home. The next
day, in Rotterdam, a 14-year old boy cyclist was hospitalized after a refrigerator,
apparently thrown out the upstairs window of a nearby house, hit him and
his bike. I am now off the blasé list for flying fridges too.