We all remember the days when a cell phone screen would shatter the first time you dropped it, and now you can practically stomp on a phone without breaking it, and there is a reason why. Cell phone companies have spent years testing their products in labs, and in the field, to learn more about the stress they can’t handle in various situation, and improvements that strengthen the phone to provide the consumer with the best product on the market. Samsung has recently placed a huge emphasis on safety testing their products after numerous instances of their smartphones exploding.
The last thing any company wants is for their product to explode while a customer is using it. The most important tests that smartphone companies administer are the drop test, the torsion test, and safety tests.
Humans are incredibly clumsy which makes any handheld object vulnerable to being dropped onto the ground. Cell phone companies understand this constant threat to their product and study the effects on the smartphone when it is dropped at various heights. The drop test is one of the few tests that all cell phone companies administer to study the durability of a smartphone. To begin, the smartphone will be place on a mechanical device and raised to a predetermined distance from the ground.
An employee will then press a button that drops the phone onto the floor. The employee will visually examine the phone and test the internal components with a computer specially programmed to quickly test smartphone functions.
A large hazard that smartphones face is the stress that is placed on a phone when it is in a bag, or in tight pants. With knowing it your phone could be bending beyond the maximum capacity it can withstand. This bending and twisting can irreparably damage internal components of your expensive new phone. The torsion test is important to determine how much distortion the phone can handle and return to its original form.
For this test, each end of the phone attaches to a lathe that will independently twist each side of the smartphone. The employees will follow the same inspection process as the drop test. The company administers the test hundreds of times to ensure the phone will withstand repeated stress over a significant period.
Cell phones dominate our society by giving us a quick distraction, and infinite knowledge at our fingertips. This small object provides so much enjoyment that we often need to charge our phone more than once during the day and continue to use it even when we can feel it overheating. To protect customers against these potentially dangerous scenarios, Samsung has implemented a new 8-point battery safety check for all lithium-ion batteries.
During this safety check, Samsung tests: durability, visual inspection, X-ray, charge and discharge, Total Volatile Organic Compound, disassembly, accelerated usage, and Delta Open Circuit Voltage. The first three tests were already used by the company for previous smartphone models, but they believe the added precautions will eliminate dangerous explosions.
