[coreboot] Free BIOS for personal computers and laptops - you
will explode! bari at onelabs.com Tue Feb 12 20:46:18 CET 2008
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote: > If you control the embedded
controller in charge of charging (sorry > about the puns), you
probably can fry a battery to the point where it > starts
burning. IIRC the OLPC EC code once had such problems. Then >
again, having a chipset spec will not help you at all when you
try to > mess with the EC. That is why Li-Ion batteries have
thermal protection circuitry. If they get too hot, the cells are
open-circuited. There are several layers of protection in Li-Ion
batteries to help protect them from ignition and Here are a
couple of links that get into more detail: "Lithium will ignite
and burn in oxygen when exposed to water or water vapors. It is
the only metal that reacts with nitrogen at room temperature.
Lithium metal is flammable and potentially explosive when
exposed to air and especially water, though it is far less
dangerous than other alkali metals