For those of you who don't know my brother, you should be thankful. Just kidding (sort of). Sometimes he lives in his own little world that nobody else actually cares about. Take the following email, for example. As the IT guy for a local company, it was his responsibility to inform the employees of the Dell battery recall. He assumed the job of giving a chemistry lesson to the office of salespeople. While this might just be an over-informative email, I found humor in the fact that he's roughly half the age of everyone else in the office yet knows enough about chemistry to be filtered into the same category as any email beginning with "Fwd." Behold, the email:


From: David Lee
Sent: Wed 8/16/2006 12:13 PM
To: All SB Staff
Subject: Dell laptop battery recall

It has come to the attention of Dell that some models of their laptop stock have exploding batteries. Dell has issued a rather monumental recall-4.1 million laptops between April 1, 2004 and July 18, 2006 are considered explosive.



The technical explanation for the batteries explosiveness is that there are little bits of lithium ions floating around in a solution (with a Carbon anode and Cobalt Oxide cathode (very powerful oxidizer) on either ends) in the battery (which is generally part of how the battery works normally), but some of it inevitably escapes (on the affected models) the channel in which they are supposed to flow-causing micro shorting of the two ends of the batteries. The reason these batteries explode is because all these micro shorts are not exactly efficient and they produce heat. The more heat you have in the electric system, the more unstable it becomes (generally). The heat becomes too great (scorching hot batteries) and the solid lithium becomes more willing to give off lithium ions; the plastic barrier where the ions were leaking in the first place becomes weaker and lets more ions through; then an exponentially increasing amount of ions start shorting various battery components. As you could imagine, the ion party gets out of hand and the battery will catch aflame or worse, explode (along with the Cobalt Oxide to further make things worse).



So. now that we've got the chemistry covered, does anybody have a dell laptop that I could check to see if the battery recall is applicable to it?



An official link (just in case you don't believe me):

https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/Default.aspx



Dell laptop on fire at a Japanese press conference: