This is a battery stress test.
And the results are pretty clear.
Do not try this at home.
In recent years, lithium ion batteries
that power our phones, our laptops,
and our Teslas have exploded, causing serious injury,
and in a few cases, death.
But a California-based company says
they've developed a new type
of battery that won't explode,
no matter what you do to it.
Battery fires are rare – about 1 in 10 million –
but with billions of batteries produced every year,
the stakes are higher than you think.
Electric cars and e-bike sales continue to grow rapidly.
And we're likely to see more massive batteries being used
to store renewable energy for homes.
The technical term
for how most battery fires start is thermal runaway.
And it works kind of like this.
If this banana were a standard lithium ion battery,
there's just a thin separation
between the parts that carry positive and negative charges.
When that barrier is broken, a battery can become a bomb.
A new technology is like a bomb squad inside the battery,
stopping a fire before it starts.
Amionx invented a technology called SafeCore.
It's a fuse that goes within the battery cell itself.
SafeCore adds an additional layer,
kind of like placing this deflated balloon
between the banana skin and tinfoil layer,
which represents the current collector.
If a battery fails, SafeCore creates a physical gap
to safely stop the flow of electricity.
SafeCore was originally developed
for batteries that soldiers use
to power their communications equipment.
That's why it needed to be bullet-safe.
If somebody was wearing that,
they'd be on fire right now.
SafeCore starts with this black goo.
It hardens and then gets rolled
out as an additional layer inside the battery.
Amionx says that SafeCore has the potential
to quickly scale across the industry
because many battery-making factories already have
the equipment to process the SafeCore slurry.
We can tech transfer
and have battery manufacturers
up and running within six months.
The company recently announced a partnership
with Stanley Black & Decker,
one of the world's top producers of power tools.
Companies have a financial incentive
to make sure their batteries are safe.
We literally, we add pennies to the bill of material.
The cost is relatively little to implement the technology.
In 2016, Samsung recalled 2.5 million phones
after several reports of fire.
Officially, the company claimed $5 billion in losses.
Exploding batteries are a really key safety problem,
and it's a terrible impact on their brand.
Lithium ion batteries are poised
to remain the go-to power source in coming years.
With that many batteries, it may be impossible
to completely eliminate the risk of fires.
But Amionx believes that their battle-tested technology
can get the risk that much closer to zero.