Acer Battery Recall: A Closer Look

Six months after Acer America told laptop owners they would not be impacted by a massive recall of batteries manufactured by Sony, on Wednesday Acer recalled 27,000 batteries in the U.S..

Acer did not return phone calls or e-mail inquiries requesting to know why it changed its tune on recalls. It did, however, publicly acknowledge on Wednesday the recalled batteries were manufactured by Sony. It has also set up an information Web site listing notebooks with bad batteries. The site also offers instructions on how to get a replacement.

Here is what Acer President Gianfranco Lanci said at an investors conference last October:

"We do not rely on Sony for batteries," Lanci said. For the small number of Acer laptops that do use Sony materials in their batteries, Lanci added, Acer's battery-charging mechanism ensures the batteries will not have problems.

Here is a link to the original story posted to sister publication InfoWorld.

We first started hearing about notebook recalls traced back to Sony with Dell last year. Next laptop maker Lenovo, Apple, and Sony itself. Over 9.6 million laptop PC batteries have been recalled so far.
Acer confessed that the rechargeable lithium ion batteries contain cells made by Sony Energy Devices that could overheat and potentially cause a fire.

What causes the problem?

All the lithium ion batteries recalled have one thing in common. That is a manufacturing defect (see the diagram) that led to rare instances where batteries overheated and even caught fire. Here is our explainer on the topic: Should Laptops Come With a Fire Extinguisher?

(Click here to enlarge)

In short, all battery recalls traced back to Sony stem from impurities (usually tiny pieces of metal) trapped within a defective battery. Those impurities got there, battery experts says, when they were manufactured by Sony. As those impurities work their way out to the edge of the anode or cathode they can cause the battery to short circuit. A short circuiting in a notebook battery can raise the temperature of the battery and cause the case to melt. Worse, if the temperature rises to fast it may generate enough pressure to create a small explosion.

According to an earlier PC World report Dell has confirmed six cases batteries either overheated or caught fire and Apple has reported nine.

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