Panasonic Recalls 280,000 Tablet Battery Packs Due to Fire Hazard

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• HomeworldFound - Sunday, May 21, 2017 - link

  The industry started to go down the Hydrogen road. Insert cartridges/tanks of hydrogen and woosh. I'm not sure that'd be much safer. Imagine crashing a car with a full tank of hydrogen.

• basroil - Sunday, May 21, 2017 - link

  "Imagine crashing a car with a full tank of hydrogen."
  
  It's actually a hell of a lot safer, and well tested too:
  1) Hydrogen can't pool below your car, which is why car fires are so deadly when gas tanks rupture. If it isn't hot enough to ignite the H2, it will harmlessly diffuse into the wind (and it's 10^10000000 x safer for the environment)
  2) Hydrogen is already a gas, so there is no risk of a BLEVE event. Worst comes to worst your car becomes a flamethrower for a minute or so, no risk of explosions.

• FunBunny2 - Monday, May 22, 2017 - link

  -- It's actually a hell of a lot safer
  
  all true, but scale's a problem. there are a number of auto/building scale energy storage/generation techs that might help. not so much for the mobile form factors.

• philehidiot - Tuesday, May 23, 2017 - link

  Ah, didn't think about it already being a gas and that alone being safer. My instinct is that to transport enough of it to be practical you'd need it liquid but equally any release into the external environment would immediately render it into a gas and as you say, cool flamethrower rather than shrapnel delivering mini bomb.

• philehidiot - Monday, May 22, 2017 - link

  --The below may represent moderately inebriated babbling. Interpret with caution--
  
  Not sure if it's more or less dangerous than petrol (although almost certainly not as safe as diesel) given the increased energy density of hydrocarbons and the incredibly low flash point of ordinary petrol (probably "gas" to you, I'm British) which I think is about -40C. That's of the reasons hydrogen won't take off in it's current form - a lot of the engineering challenges have been sorted (such as it making pipes brittle) but the simple fact is that hydrocarbon based fuel has a higher energy density and so you go further on a tank. When someone cracks storing hydrogen in a denser way, creating it without massively polluting and also ensuring it's safer to transport than petrol then we might be on to something. In the mean time, we're stuck with making good ole gasoline as efficient and non polluting as possible.
  
  Personally I ride a motorcycle as my only means of transport and I find having a tank of stuff that explodes once it hits anything ~250C, atop an engine that probably has sections topping that temperature (do correct me if I'm wrong) placed between my legs to be an excellent way to travel in safety and comfort. Sarcasm aside, I actually get quite stressed and feel very unsafe when I have to drive a car and I've had a licence for that longer than I have a bike. I can't stand the detachment you get and I need to know what's going on beneath me - a bike tells you what the tyres are doing and so on whilst a car just feels numb, disconnected and unsafe. Plus I park exactly where I want to be, which is great for a cripple like me.
  
  Dunno how I managed to switch onto to talking about bikes there...

• HomeworldFound - Monday, May 22, 2017 - link

  Either way it works man.

• FunBunny2 - Monday, May 22, 2017 - link

  -- That's of the reasons hydrogen won't take off in it's current form
  
  and there's another reason: the laws of thermodynamics, which boil down to, "you don't get more energy out than you put in, and the best you can do is break even". more simply: creating free hydrogen (you can't lift it from the ground), and cooling it to liquid consumes far more energy, globally, than ends up in the tank. the advantage of petrol(s) is that the energy to create a litre of the stuff amounts, mostly, to just lifting it from the ground. cracking towers consume energy, but each level emits a different product, so the net energy cost per crack (is that a proper image?) is much less than the energy embedded in the product.

• philehidiot - Tuesday, May 23, 2017 - link

  Yeh you're bang on. Currently hydrogen is generally extracted using natural gas and high pressure steam. The energy put in to extract this is way way way in excess of what you get out when you burn it to propel a car. If we are to do it on a large scale, it's gonna be sea water and electrolysis using nuclear power to even start being better for the environment than petrol. The efficiency of hydrogen as it is currently produced, combined with crappy energy density is just sickening. As I'm sure you're well aware.

• cekim - Sunday, May 21, 2017 - link

  Companies (and their engineers) sometimes either:
  a. Make honest mistakes - you can't travel in time to know how things perform over years without waiting years in many regards. You also can't predict with 100% accuracy what manufacturing tolerances will really be - you'll find out later.
  OR
  b. (more often) underestimate the creative stupidity of their customers.
  
  Rarely do they publicly comment on "b" (aka: "the customer is always right"), but when you dig into things more often than not (not always, but often), you find that the product was adequately designed, but misused.
  
  So, if you want leading edge tech, you have to deal with some risk. If that risk is too great or you don't trust the company to make ethical trade-offs, don't buy. Market forces are a beautiful thing.

• HomeworldFound - Sunday, May 21, 2017 - link

  The battery industry makes far too many mistakes. It went from exploding phones to an exploding factory/manufacturing plant. Things go wrong but in something so volatile I would make damn sure my potential explosive products didn't contain metal shavings or detonate when warm.
  
  This is an industry that needs to be as close to perfect as possible.