The issue is that these power banks are often cheapo corporate gifts or bought out of vending machines, catering to the cheapest possible price and not certified to anything.
In this case they have crappy BMS that doesn’t have thermal sensors or even make sure the cells are balanced during charging, and no mechanical integrity so the cell can just get crushed and explode.
The solution is to require all consumer electronics with batteries to be certified (if carried on a plane or in the post), and part of that certification process needs to be mechanical; including crushing with normal levels of in-transit forces, and electrical testing; including charging the device at a high temperature.
It’s not that simple… the voltages are all different, and each chemistry has different charge and discharge rates, so this just makes the end product insanely complicated and expensive.
We've already got programmable charging chips that can adapt to different chemistries, and they're already pretty cheap, and USB-C has proven that fancy voltage negotiation protocols can be done cheaply.
I swear the majority of UL and CE marked electronics on amazon are fraudulent. Honestly, I don't think certification is going to work, at least not with out a long term economic policy to onshore manufacture. There's just no practical system for verifying certification when the origin is obfuscated for the majority of our good, and produced outside of our regulatory system. We also just don't make these things in sufficient quantity, or economically enough to supplant the import market.
I think the mistake here is not printing the registration number on the products themselves so that you can type it into the portal or whatever and look up what it’s supposed to look like. Like photo ID.
Yep. UL & CE certification to standard X. The lack of retail marketplace and manufacturing regulation enforcement are the problems that are fixable similar to lack of safety standards in automobiles in the US prior to 1966. Safety regs are written in blood and so people can winge and whine all they want about headaches, cost, red tape, and paperwork but too bad.
In this case they have crappy BMS that doesn’t have thermal sensors or even make sure the cells are balanced during charging, and no mechanical integrity so the cell can just get crushed and explode.
The solution is to require all consumer electronics with batteries to be certified (if carried on a plane or in the post), and part of that certification process needs to be mechanical; including crushing with normal levels of in-transit forces, and electrical testing; including charging the device at a high temperature.