First of a two-part special report on notebook battery technology

San Jose, Calif. -- Five industry groups on two continents are quietly hammering out new procedures and standards to prevent a recurrence of the recall of lithium-ion batteries that swept up a fifth major notebook maker last week. Fujitsu Computer Systems Corp. said it would recall as many as 287,000 systems using batteries made by Sony Corp., putting the total number as high as 7.5 million since the recalls began in August.

Apple, Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba have already announced recalls of the Sony batteries. Some analysts estimated that the total cost of the moves will be as high as $280 million, a figure that has drawn the concentrated attention of senior management.

"I've had more meetings with my VPs in the last couple months than I've had in the last couple years," said one battery specialist at a notebook company, who asked not to be named.

In the United States, OEM companies are coordinating four efforts to attack the problem. In Japan a government-led plan is addressing the issue with local vendors, who make as many as 70 percent of the world's batteries.

Whether U.S. OEM and Japanese vendor efforts mesh or clash remains to be seen. Both sides agree that the problems stem from the contamination of lithium-ion cells by metal particles. Their work is divided among several recent initiatives.

• A new effort under the IPC will have its second meeting this week in Illinois to lay out objectives for a quality control standard for testing cells.

• Underwriters Laboratories (UL) will conduct a meeting Nov. 1 to thrash out plans to upgrade its own lithium battery standard. It will also step up the frequency of its audits of battery makers and enhance training for its auditors.

• Notebook makers have submitted a proposal to revise the specs of an IEEE notebook battery standard, significantly tightening up its provisions.

• A working group under the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) is weaving tough company-specific battery requirements into a suggested industry standard that it will share with UL.

• In Japan late last month, the government kicked off a committee to draft by March a new safety test standard for notebook battery makers.

"Sometimes adversity brings the greatest cooperation," said John Grosso, chairman of the IPC OEM Critical Components Committee, which was formed in mid-September. Grosso is also a director of supplier engineering and quality at Dell Inc.

"The question of liability in the supply base is getting major visibility, so the level of cooperation among battery suppliers is high," Grosso said.

Attendees at the first IPC meeting were not able to formulate specific objectives, however. "The right people were definitely not in the room," said the OEM battery specialist. "It was a bunch of regulatory guys." Only "three of the 25" people at the meeting had actually "ever been in a battery plant," he said.

In an interview before the meeting, Grosso said he would suggest that the group define a specification for the so-called delta overcharge current test. The test compares an initial cell with one that has had a full heat stress test. If the difference in the overcharge current level between the new and tested cell is too great, the lot is pulled for further testing.

The delta OCV test aims to identify cells that have too many contaminants in the electrolyte. Such contaminants were believed to be the cause of problems with Sony batteries used in the Apple and Dell notebooks that were recalled in August.

"Right now this test is handled differently by each vendor. You can spend a day just understanding how a vendor does its delta OCV test," said Grosso.

The IPC committee has preliminary numbers for the levels of contamination it will consider to be acceptable, but wants to review them with experts before it makes them public.

More audits
The IPC standard could be a tool that auditors at UL might use as they try to step up tests at battery makers.

One source who has met with UL representatives said the group plans to beef up its so-called 1642 standard on lithium-ion batteries before the end of the year. "It's a really aggressive schedule," the source said.

The UL may step up the frequency of its audits from quarterly to monthly checks, and it plans to add training for its test crew.

Separately, David Ling, a regulatory policy manager at Hewlett-Packard Co., has drafted a proposal for revising the IEEE1625 specification, which addresses cell, pack and system issues for notebook-class lithium-ion batteries. Apple, Dell, HP, Intel and Sony have volunteered to work on the revision. The IEEE is expected to respond to the proposal in early November.

Details of the revisions have yet to be worked out. However, the goal is to make a number of optional provisions mandatory. The group also plans to incorporate requirements set down in a more recent IEEE1725 standard for cell phone batteries.

"What that does is give OEMs something they can write into their specifications and have vendors test against," said the OEM battery specialist.

Ling also chairs the regulatory policy committee of the ITIC, which is helping to coordinate the various efforts through the ITIC's existing battery working group. The working group "started as a means to share information, but now they want to take action" about the recall problems, Ling said.

Even before the August recalls started, the ITIC's battery group had been culling tough battery requirements from individual notebook makers to create a single shared requirements list. It intends to share those requirements with UL as an input to its process for updating the 1642 standard.

"Rather than have six different test protocols from individual notebook makers, the battery makers would just have one," said Jim Seippel, a Dell manager who chairs the ITIC battery group.

Meanwhile in Japan, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry formed a working group within its Commerce and Information Policy Bureau to write by March a standard for testing notebook batteries. All battery makers are expected to comply with the effort.

In the United States, sources at notebook makers seem to be relying primarily on their own initiatives to deal with the problem.

Intel Corp., for example, has refined a mechanism that gives notebook makers a new way to predict battery cell failures before they occur. The so-called Intel Adaptive Mobile Power System uses a patent-pending algorithm to detect impending cell failures, then turns the battery off, said Don Nguyen, a battery architect at Intel.

"There are people planning to use it because once a cell is in runaway mode there is nothing you can do," said Nguyen.

The actual battery failures behind all the fuss have been amazingly few, said Dell's Seippel. Dell experienced only 11 failures out of 4.1 million notebooks recalled. Because each notebook battery packs seven cells, that amounts to 11 failures in more than 30 million products, he said.

"That's a very, very low failure rate, but still one we feel is unacceptable," Seippel said.

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