The Chinese are fooling us with batteries.
Recently I bought a flashlight on Ebay, from a Chinese Vendor. It was not expensive, and it came with an 18650 Lithium battery and a spare battery. Advertized as " light torch". Illuminating trees that were 300 meters away, with a blinding beam. I thought to myself, even when the flashlight is no good, the batteries alone are worth it. So one way or another, I could not go wrong.
When it arrived, I found the flashlight gives only 3x more light as the LED of my Iphone. So the fraud began already at arrival. I do not understand what kind of thoughts these Chinese sellers have in their brain. They really don't give a damn, if you ask me. But I do not know this for sure, so we have to call it a misunderstanding by people who meant to close an honest deal.
Anyway, this article is about the batteries only.
The batteries had so much self discharge, they get half empty just by storage after 3 weeks. That is no compare against Japanese 18650 batteries, I have here. These keep 80% of their charge for one year. With those dirty Chinese batteries, after 4x charging already, the self discharge began to accelerate, and after 8x charging the batteries were at end of life. All of that in just a few months. Now how can that be? I saw a video on youtube, about some Chinese, selling power banks of which every second battery was a fake (filled with sand). So I was curious what was inside the batteries they sold me.
Battery of the infamous JINBOSHI Brand, with it's jacket off.
One of them was swollen.
Now, that should not happen, because it indicates very high pressure, and they could explode. There must be something wrong with the safety valve. So I took one apart, to find the cause of the problem.
While taking off the top cap, an extremely powerful blow of gas came out. It was really frightening to see the energy of that blow out. That was very bad! The fucking thing could have exploded in my face, or cause a fire in my office, while charging over night. The gas smelled like Acetone. Which is a very well burning, and self inflaming if just hot enough.
So I wanted to see what's wrong with the safety valve. Pictured below here:
It was a FAKE safety valve.
This is so disgusting, because this is really DANGEROUS. That fu**ing Chinese battery factory, saved cost of 1/2 of a cent, and put me in danger for that. The Chinese tick different. When building 100.000 batteries, that saves 50.000 Cents, or 500 Euro. That is their reasoning. You can think about president Trump what you want, but the way he handles the Chinese junk producing industry, it's their well deserved treatment. I try to imagine what could happen, if I would buy a Chinese electric car, and put it in the garage over night to charge. Which garage is below my bedroom, and the floors are made of wood. No... that is NOT a good idea.
FAKE pressure valve from the inside. As you can see here, it is a solid round plate, and not a valve at all.
That was not very promising for the rest of the battery too. Here is the mess which came out:
Opening the side, some strange brown smeared soup becomes visible. This battery is theoretically like new. It was only 4 months old, and only 8x charged.
More of the brown soup.
This is the best part :)
I know little about batteries, but it needs no trained eye, to see this is a total mess, The black stuff should be the Lithium. Or whatever the bastards used. It is not very well attached to the copper. I have no way to verify the Lithium content of this stuff. From what I heard, Lithium burns so very aggressive, it is even dangerous. Well, if this black stuff is the Lithium, why does it not want to burn? When just held into a flame, it did a little something for a very short moment. II would not call that burning. Still very hesitating to throw this thing in the dust bin, because it may start a fire perhaps still. So to deactivate it, I put this roll it in a jar of water. To my suprize that made something happen. It boiled enthusiastic, but without getting warm.
It was setting free the typical "smell of vacuum". Now you may wonder perhaps how vacuum can have a smell? Astronauts say, spacesuits used for a space walk, and also moon rocks, once brought into air, have a specific "burn" smell. They call it the smell of space. (Google for it).
You can have this same smell, when you break the glass of a defective vacuum tube. It is most probably the same smell. All vacuum tubes, when you break them, smell the same. So you have metal objects, which were in vacuum for decades, and suddenly they are exposed to air. Thought there is not a visible chemical reaction, there IS one, caused by oxygen, and the metal had a burn smell, which reminds me of the smell of a gun which was just used before. It is exactly this specific smell, produced by this battery, when put in the water. Don't ask me why that is.
Afterwards, the copper foil came totally clean out of the water jar. Very strange.