I watch in awe -- and a bit of horror -- as the flame dies out, leaving behind a charred black husk of what used to be a Galaxy S8 battery. I've never seen a battery explode before. Fortunately, the explosion happened in the Gumi factory, where Samsung assembles 1 million phones a month. It's also where I see the company's extensive, new testing process. In this case, the battery caught fire because a factory worker applied 20 kilonewtons of pressure on it instead of the standard 13 kilonewtons. (A single kilonewton of force can knock down a 225-pound person.).
If the battery had been truly defective, Samsung would have sent the entire lot back to its supplier, potentially as many as 15,000 units, "It very seldom happens," a worker in Samsung's durability testing lab tells me, In January, Samsung revealed the Note 7 battery fiasco stemmed from two separate issues, The external casing of the first battery was too small for the components inside, rebecca case for apple iphone 6, 6s and 7 - chatsworth bloom causing it to short-circuit and ignite, The supplier of the second battery had introduced a completely different manufacturing defect that led to the same result..
"That was a very painful experience, a painful accident," Koh says, echoing his comments from January. Samsung realized none of its previous checks would have caught those problems. So it changed the process, instituting an eight-point inspection test that includes some steps that were new and others its suppliers had conducted. During my three hours in Samsung's Smart City campus in Gumi, just five miles from South Korea's scenic Mount Geumosan provincial park, I see most of those tests in action. The battery compression test, for example, is part of Samsung's durability check. Samsung conducted those tests before the Note 7's problems, but now does them more regularly.
"The emphasis is to make sure the batteries don't have any problem," says Daniel Lee, director of global manufacturing and innovation, In the factory, Lee literally walks me through Samsung's assembly process and eight-point safety check, Durability tests examine batteries that have been overcharged, punctured or exposed to extreme temperatures, One machine is set to 130 degrees Celsius (266 degrees Fahrenheit) for 60 minutes, Another bakes a rebecca case for apple iphone 6, 6s and 7 - chatsworth bloom phone at 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit) for seven hours..
Other tests look for leakage or voltage changes. I step into an area that's been walled off from the rest of the open factory floor. It's much cooler in here to compensate for the heat generated by dozens of phones. Samsung's electronic, poppy ringtone, called "Over the Horizon," echoes around the room as one Galaxy S8 after another cycles through an automated software test. After the ringtone, a video pops up, then Angry Birds and then YouTube. The phones' software is simulating daily usage at a much faster clip than normal.
