Lithium-ionpacks are expensive, so if you want to make yours to last longer, here are some things to keep in mind:

» Lithium ion chemistryprefers partial discharge to deep discharge, so it’s best to avoid taking the laptop battery all the way down to zero. Since lithium-ion chemistry does not have a “memory”, you do not harm the laptop battery pack with a partial discharge. If the voltage of a lithium-ion cell drops below a certain level, it’s ruined.
» Lithium-ion batteries age as. They only last two to three years, even if they are sitting on a shelf unused. So do not “avoid using” the laptop battery with the thought that the Aspire 4732 laptop battery pack will last five years. It won’t. Also, if you are buying a new laptop battery pack, you want to make sure it really is new. If it has been sitting on a shelf in the store for a year, it won’t last very long. Manufacturing dates are important.
» Avoid heat, which degrades the batteries.

Exploding Batteries
Now that we know how to keep lithium-ion batteries working longer, let’s look at why they can explode. Several news reports in the past six months describe laptop s with lithium-ionthat caught on fire.

If the laptop battery gets hot enough to ignite the electrolyte, you are going to get a fire. There are video clips and photos on the Web that show just how serious these dell vostro 1310 battery  fires can be. The CBC article,”Summer of the Exploding laptop ,” rounds up several of these incidents.

When a fire like this happens, it is usually caused by an internal short in the laptop battery. Recall from the previous section that lithium-ion cells contain a separator sheet that keeps the positive and negative electrodes apart. If that sheet get punctured  dell latitude d830 battery  and the electrodes touch, the laptop battery heats up very quickly. You may have experienced the kind of heat a laptop batterycan produce if you have ever put a normal 9-volt laptop battery in your pocket. It a coin shorts across the two terminals, the laptop battery gets quite hot.

In a separator failure, that same kind of short compaq presario cq42 battery happens inside the lithium-ion. Since lithium-ion batteries are so energetic, they get very hot. The heat causes the laptop battery to vent the organic solvent used as an electrolyte, and the heat (or a nearby spark) can light it. Once that happens inside one of the cells, the heat of the fire cascades to the other cells and the whole pack goes up in flames.

It is important to note that fires are very rare. Still, it only takes a couple of fires and a little media coverage to prompt a recall.