Safer Laptop Battery Developed by Matsushita

[Slimy]

Matsushita, most widely known as Panasonic, announced today that the company has developed a safer lithium-ion battery for notebooks. The company says that they began shipping the battery this April and is now ready for mass-production. The battery is protected from overheating by the addition of a heat-resistant insulator to the battery cell. Normally, a li-ion battery would only have a thin separator between the cathode and the anode that could easily be punctured by a short-circuit. And as we are now painfully aware, short-circuiting batteries can sometimes lead to bad things such as fires and explosions. The additional heat insulator, according to Matsushita, has better insulating and protective features than the current separator and will prevent overheating even in the event of a short-circuit.

The company has also pointed out that they are making a special effort to ensure that there will be no contamination in these batteries: "MBI has taken measures to prevent lithium-ion batteries from contaminating with electrically conductive materials by eliminating foreign substances from battery materials and creating a clean environment in the battery factory" the company said in a prepared statement. Sony's battery cells, those guilty of all the battery fuss this year, were said to have been contaminated with small metal particles during the manufacturing process which ultimately caused the short-circuiting to occur and many major computer manufacturers to issue battery recalls. Both the IEEE and the IPC have announced that they are working on issuing new laptop battery standards in hopes of improving safety and reliability. The IPC expects to have their standards completed by the second quarter of 2007, and IEEE recently announced that they have accelerated their schedule so that the revised IEEE 1625 standard will be complete by the end of 2007.

Ars Technica