Using engineering resources – and with the findings verified by an independent firm – Samsung diagnosed the two issues that caused the Note 7 smartphone battery to catch on fire.
The first issue, from one of the original manufacturers, was that a corner of the battery casing crushed a corner of the battery, bending some electrode windings back on themselves and causing dangerous paths for the electricity.
The second issue, from one of the replacement manufacturers, was overly bulky welding and a lack of insulation tape, which allowed the positive and negative electrodes to contact each other, again resulting in dangerous paths for the electricity.
Samsung is the first major cell phone manufacturer to face and have to debug this kind of defect. Its new engineering and quality assurance process should make the Note 8 one of the most heavily tested phones out there, when it gets released.
By Sharon Campbell