For months, many have speculated over what doomed Samsung’s Note 7. Today, the Korean company has finally revealed the cause for the smartphone’s tendency to explode, and true to many speculations online, the root cause of the explosions comes from the flawed batteries that the smartphone sports.
There are two distinct battery flaws that happened with the Note 7. The first main flaw is caused by how the Note 7’s original batteries were manufactured. With the original batch of Note 7 smartphones, the battery flaw stems from the electrodes. As the casing of the Note 7 was too small to safely fit the electrode assembly inside, this may cause the positive and negative electrodes to come into contact with each other, leading to a short circuit that results in the phone exploding.
The second battery flaw has to do with those found in the replacement Note 7. According to the analysts, the replacement Note 7s sport batteries that have welding defects in them. This welding defect led to the positive tab of the battery to penetrate the insulation tape and the separator, causing it to come into contact with the negative electrode and causing a short circuit. In addition to this welding mishap, there are also batteries that do not have the insulation tape in the first place.
Samsung has also run tests on the other features of the Note 7 such as fast charging, wireless charging, USB Type-C and many others. The conclusion from those tests shows that none of the other features would have cause the Note 7 to fail as it did. In short, the Note 7’s problem lies solely in its battery.
As for what the company would do going forward, Samsung has announced that it will be implementing a number of changes to its internal processes in order to prevent the Note 7’s catastrophic failure from happening again. This includes assigning teams to own the crucial final checks for each device’s core components and putting batteries through an eight-point test that ranges from visual inspection to x-ray inspection to full disassembly.
Now that Samsung and the public knows what exactly went wrong with the Note 7, let’s hope the company becomes more vigilant when it comes to the upcoming Galaxy S8 phones. After all, the company can ill-afford yet another malfunctioning flagship device.
Source: Android Authority, Engadget