Saying that Lithium Ion batteries explode makes for a hyperbolic statement emblematic of things said during the latest US presidential debate.
Lithium batteries have 7 safety features to prevent fires, but manufacturers have to be diligent to maintain chemical purity throughout the manufacturing process. Intelligent lithium ion manufacturers build the batteries in a Clean Room to minimize contaminates to the lowest levels possible. CPU and other IC manufacturers have to use the same level of care when build integrated circuits where 4000+ transistors can fit within the width of a human hair. Woot woot Intel ^^ to 10nm & Beyond!
Recent fires in Samsung Note 7, Hover-boards and even the Boeing Dreamliner 787 battery underscore the reason that lithium ion battery manufacturers must maintain chemical purity in order to insure the resulting cells are safe to use.
BMS Protection Works
A lithium ion battery is a chemical storage device that absorbs & discharges direct current or DC. Most cell phones for example use a prismatic or wound rectangular lithium ion polymer cell of 3.6-3.8 volts nominal, where 4.26v is 100% charged and 2.9v is 0% charged. The positive and negative leads of the battery cell are connected to a BMS controller that provides essential safety protection!
The the BMS or Battery Managment System is a small integrated circuit that protects the lithium ion cell from over discharge, over charge, reverse terminal connection, shorting, high heat, mechanical damage, swelling and other phenomenon that are associated with abnormal or unsafe operating conditions. While the Lithium Ion chemistry is relatively unstable, the overlapping safety measures provided by the BMS result in relatively good battery safety in lithium ion energy storage systems. The BMS and the cells that it controls form an energy storage safety system.
iPhone 6s BMS Worked!
In the case of the iPhone 6s random shut down debacle Apple was able to source to a defect in the battery cell manufacturing. The BMS inn the iPhone does exactly what it was designed to do, namely cutoff power output from the cell when an abnormality triggered the BMS. The defective chemistry in some iPhone 6s batteries would produce a sudden drop in voltage at 40% state of charge, triggering a power output shutdown for safety. Apple offered to replace the battery in any customer iPhone 6s that was affected.
Chinese Manufacturing, First World Designs
Apple develops its own battery chemistry, BMS, and cell designs in house, but they outsource the manufacturing to businesses in China. Sony & Samsung similarly outsource manufacturing of the electronics & batteries to China. High volume production technology of modern electronics was primarily developed in China. If we consider the geo-political history of consumer electronics design and manufacturing, we can see that first world nations like the USA, Japan and Korea dominate the front end design and development of electronics while Taiwan, China, Indonesia and other developing countries in southeast Asia dominate manufacturing of consumer electronic devices, components, batteries & more!
By the Billion
Today we live in era of mass production that started more than 100 years ago. The scale of manufacturing today never previously seen before. More than 30 trillion tons of man made materials have been produced by human society. The corresponding eco-system destruction associated with the global scale of human activity goes way beyond air pollution, water pollution and climate change!
Billion is the new "catch" word in manufacturing, noteworthy the Tesla Giga-factory going online right now in Nevada USA to produce billions of lithium ion batteries for the clean technology Tesla Model S, X & 3, even for the next Roadster! Exciting times in the electromotive sector as all the automakers flock to develop electric vehicles inspired by the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S!
200mi Ev's for everyone next!
The next batch of EV's launching in 2017 have 60kWh or more of storage, even the Nissan Leaf is slated to get a bigger battery like this! This means 200 miles of EV mode per charge, more than enough to cover the driving needs of the overwhelming majority of vehicle operators, especially consumers who typically already own a gas power or hybrid, who in 90% of cases drive less than 50mi per day on average!
Trillions $ The Public
You hear a lot of news about Billionaires, those less than 1% people who have the financial muscle to create big changes in the world that impact the lives of many normal people! There are actually thousands of billionaires in the world. The normal person valued at more than $1 million each by the US Government, along with the other 99%, spend trillions of dollars every year; the big money is in the big numbers, the general public buying all sorts of stuff throughout their lives.
Reality Today
The world is wild when you think about what reality is like today, especially when you consider what it was like just 30 or 40 years ago. You already exist as a human machine hybrid if you regularly make use of a smartphone and or the internet for example. Everything you have ever searched for online, everything you have ever posted, everything you have ever looked at online, all of exists as a tertiary digital extension of you. You exist online in form far more complex than a biography could represent. If you interact with the internet enough, a multidimension extension of your values, interests, believes, theology and ideologies forms your digital footprint!
Human Machine Hybrids
I am extremely interested in the trans-humanism movement, especially the part of technology that will allow me to plug my brain directly into an A.I. enhanced computer that I can wear like jewelry for which there are many sci-fi media examples to draw from as an idea!
GPU Forward ^^
NVidia the GPU maker (+more) currently sells the Blaise Pascal inspired GTX1080 that dominated the $600 GPU card market for VR machines and more ^^ NVidia recently build the worlds most energy efficient supercomputer, named after the amazing Saturn V rocket, the DGX SATURNV.
They announced that this machine will be used in house with A.I. that will help the engineering staff to design Volta and other next gen GPU products that will raise the bar for the who GPU sector again, and again. I see a bright future for NVidia. If you look computers from 2006 onward, most of the gains in performance have been GPU related.
Even Intel the industrial powerhouse of CPU manufacturing have take a focus on putting increasingly powerful integrate graphics with their latest Skylake, Kaby Lake and Cannon Lake processor families. It was AMD, the yeilded duopoly "competitor" of Intel that took the idea of higher performance APU's into the Xbox One, One S, and Sony Play Station 4 and 4 Pro.
HDR TV
Looking at the TV landscape, you can see a few emergent trends. HDR or high dynamic range one of the newest technologies for TV. Ask "Alexa" "What is a Television" and listen carefully to the response. HDR came from digital photography, where a few bracketed frames, one over exposed, one under exposed and one with good exposure, digitally combined to produce an image with greater dynamic range, This makes the details in shadow shade areas of the image pop while keep the highlights from being overblown, maximizing detail across a wider dynamic range of light levels, creating HDR images that are more in line with the way our eyes are able to see.
4K, 8K, 12K : Image + More
Look at the history of resolutions. 144P, 320P, 480P, 720P, 1080P, now 4K, next 8K, to reach 35mm film we need 12K and to achieve iMax 70mm film in digital requires something like ~32K : that 20+ years into the future, and I frankly do not have a crystal ball, only a deeply analytical mind obsessed with technology! I see information technology as nothing more than a reflection of the magic happening inside our heads, in our brains, that which gives rise to consciousness itself!
Microsoft Hololens
Lithium ion provides the energy to power this $3000+ AR experience platform & more. VR may be getting all the lime light today with the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift over @ Facebook! A.R. is the augmented reality of science fiction where human machine hybridization gives our hero's in fiction their super powers to see and understand more, in more ways, more frequencies, faster, with greater fidelity, deep knowledge and powerful super human logic!
The way that YouTube has revolutionized broadcasting, it is the Hololense in its 2nd, 3rd and 4th revision will create entirely new ways to see, do and think about everything. Just short of completely revolutionary in its first revision, the Hololens is the technological grandfather of groundbreaking future technologies that will create even greater changes in society.
Digital Money
Bitcoin early evidence of our going to the monetary model depicted in Star Trek. Digital currencies are making waves that started a long time ago with credit & debit cards. Today many different cryptographic currencies exist as yet more examples of human machine hybridization. This underscores our need to protect the worlds electric grids from outages. If our money is in the networks, then we need reliable power for business to happen. Digital credits will ultimately prevail as the currency of the future. With English & ESL we are already uniting as one people, in one super system of globalization, on one planet earth! Together we are stronger!
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