Today, Samsung published its completed reports on the investigation on why their Flagship caught fire. We already received a preliminary report on the suspected culprit which was the device’s battery. Now we have a detailed insight as to what went wrong and where it went wrong.
2016 was a brilliant year for the global smartphone conglomerate but it was tainted severely by the unfortunate incidents with their Flagship, the Galaxy Note 7. After issuing a mass recall of the devices and having achieved an approximate 98% recall by the start of 2017, Samsung was already investigating their failure.
The company had collected around 200,000 phones and separate 30,000 batteries. A huge chunk of the workforce was employed for the sole purpose of figuring out the fault. The investigation was initially suspecting the battery’s Fast Charging capability but found out that it was not to be blamed. Then it was figured that maybe it was the faulty waterproofing which led to a leakage and short circuiting. This theory was also proven wrong too. Finally after investigating into the matter since the beginning of recall back in September 2016, Samsung’s President Mr. DJ Koh revealed that the fault lied in the battery design and its manufacturing process while the Hardware and software were proven to be innocent in the matter.
Reported last week, the batteries provided by Samsung SDI had a defect in the top right section of the cell which caused fire through repeated charge and discharge, in other words, charging the device and using the battery resulted in sparks which eventually caused the fires.
The second group of battery manufacturers from Hong-Kong, Amperex, identified the defect in their set of batteries and revealed it to be in the top left corner which lacked the necessary insulation to counter the overheating of the cells and resulted in overheating of the entire unit, eventually causing short circuiting and fires.
Samsung has worked tirelessly and collaborated with various private organisations like UL, TUV Rheinland and Exponent, to formulate a safety measure which they label as an 8-step safety check which will be enforced on all the devices to come in the future and will prevent history from repeating itself. Samsung apologises for the trouble it has caused and aims to improve its standing among the global market in the future with the safety of its consumers as the foremost agenda.