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ROCHESTER, Minn. — A Minnesota teenager was injured earlier this week when his cellphone battery exploded in his pocket.
The boy heard a hiss and then a pop before his smartphone slid down his leg, according to his mother. The battery had burned a hole through his pocket.
Teachers helped the eighth-grader put the fire out, and his parents took him to the hospital, where he was found to have second-degree burns, according to CBS Minnesota.
A cellphone battery exploding is not a common occurrence, but it does happen, according to the Consumer Products Safety Commission. The cause is thermal runaway.
- Don't use chargers or batteries that are not designed to work with your phone and avoid knock off brands.
- Keep your phone away from excessive heat.
- Keep the battery's positive and negative connections from crossing. This is typically caused by a piece of metal coming into contact with the battery.
Via KARE
"Thermal runaway is a domino effect so the battery gets hot and that makes a chemical reaction such that it gets hotter and hotter until gases escape or it explodes," Matt Gray, Technology Director for Clockwork Media Systems, told KARE.
Dropping a phone can damage the battery and potentially lead to an explosion, although batteries now are made to be more stable than those from 2004 or 2005. Another problem comes when a battery is replaced with a different brand than the phone came with, or charged with an off-brand charger.
"They are made cheaply, they provide power to your battery in an unreliable way and can really affect its health," web developer Lloyd Dalton said.
Multiple cases of cellphone batteries exploding have made the news recently. A South Korean man received second-degree burns earlier this month when his battery caught fire in his pocket. It was the second such incident in a year involving Samsung lithium-ion batteries.
