Building a safer, denser lithium-ion battery

Hardly a month passes without shocking news of lithium-ion batteries catching fire: Laptops are torched, airlines are grounded, hoverboards go up in flames. The 2016 fires inside Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 smartphone led to a US $5 billion recall and then to a discontinuation of the model, moves that together cut Samsung's market capitalization by many billions. In January 2017, after months of speculation, Samsung announced that two separate design problems created the battery malfunctions that caused some of the devices to overheat. That different design flaws can produce the same catastrophic outcome underlines the inherently unstable nature of today's Li-ion batteries. Any mobile product incorporating them is thus potentially unsafe.