One of the most humiliating corporate crises of recent history has to be last year’s recall of the Galaxy Note.
Airlines around the world started telling passengers that the devices were banned during their pre flight briefings, causing untold damage for the Samsung brand.
Now Samsung have completed a review into what happened including an infographic illustrating the exact problem with the batteries.
That review shows the design and manufacturing errors that resulted in the batteries bursting into flames. How Samsung are fixing it or putting in systems to prevent that happening again isn’t discussed.
What the infographic does show is how complex the design, engineering and manufacturing is in modern technology – something that is often overlooked by many technologists.
Battery technologies are particularly fraught as a lot of energy is compressed into a small space and the chemistry of Lithium Ion batteries makes them particularly dangerous should they be damaged or incorrectly used, as Boeing found with the early models of the 787 Dreamliner.
Modern life and the devices that we take for granted are complex and that complexity though can easily come back to bite us. As Samsungs’ exploding batteries show, sometimes that complexity is difficult to manage.
