When Your Mobile’s Battery Explodes, How Does The Company Find Out Whose Fault It Is?

With powerful batteries powering smartphones these days, it has become quite common to hear incidents of batteries exploding. But when a smartphone explodes, how does the company investigate as to who was at fault– the user or the battery manufacturer? Well, the process is quite complex and most of the time, brands somehow pin the blame on end users. But is there a scientific approach towards understanding who exactly is at fault?

We asked this question at the Energy Innovation Centre, University of Warwick and got to understand the basics of battery forensics. “It’s part of a puzzle. Once we get a damaged battery (or whatever is left of it) for forensics our job is to work backwards to understand the likely cause of failure. As part of our work, we do a lot of battery testing where we intentionally generate a failure and then gather evidence. Now, for forensics we simply match the damaged battery with a particular evidence to understand the probable cause,” explained a researcher at the University of Warwick.

In simple terms, at a battery testing centre, experts intentionally overcharge or discharge or damage the battery causing it to explode to gather evidence from the debris. Now, when a test sample is sent, they look out for similar evidence to know the cause. So, there are different markers for water damage, overcharging, high current flow or battery puncture and the testers simply match type the damage on a case by case basis.

The researcher said that the major reason for battery explosion is overcharging and using high voltage current for changing smaller capacity batteries. Interestingly, the researcher also mentioned that it is not always possible to pinpoint the reason for a battery to fail because sometimes there really isn’t much left of the battery after it has exploded. So, the process of guessing the exact cause is difficult, time consuming and the equipment required for battery testing is very expensive.

No smartphone brand will ever talk about how batteries are actually tested in public as most of them source batteries from other vendors. This is the reason it is easier for smartphone brands to pass the blame on consumers and cite “battery overcharging” as the probable reason.