Thinkpads Forum

At work I use a HP ZBook G3 Studio. It has a fairly thin battery. Twice in the past year, I have had to get the battery replaced because it started swelling and caused either the laptop case to separate or the trackpad to rise. I had never heard of this battery swelling problem until a year ago, but apparently it's pretty common.

This has made me wonder if the problem is possible for any of my personal laptops. I have a Thinkpad T60. Did batteries for older laptops like that ever have the swelling problem?

The swelling tends to occur, IME, mostly in batteries with the flat Li-po type cells which are made for today's thin-and-light laptops. They are sealed such that any gases that are released as a result of cell degradation are trapped inside the thermally protective foil wrapping the cell is encapsulated within, and thus they swell up. I see this all the time with inexpensive consumer-grade hardware (Chromebooks, HP Streams etc.). Now that I think about it, almost all of the time I see swelling it's in an HP...

While it's not impossible for the traditional cylindrical Li-ion celled battery packs to do this, I have only seen one (for a Tx10/20 series) do so.

theterminator93 wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 07, 2021 9:42 am

The swelling tends to occur, IME, mostly in batteries with the flat Li-po type cells which are made for today's thin-and-light laptops. They are sealed such that any gases that are released as a result of cell degradation are trapped inside the thermally protective foil wrapping the cell is encapsulated within, and thus they swell up. I see this all the time with inexpensive consumer-grade hardware (Chromebooks, HP Streams etc.). Now that I think about it, almost all of the time I see swelling it's in an HP...

While it's not impossible for the traditional cylindrical Li-ion celled battery packs to do this, I have only seen one (for a Tx10/20 series) do so.

I would say it is highly unlikely for the traditional cylindrical 18650 cells to swell. Typically in extreme overdischarge they just spill their guts like Ni-MH cells. But then, if those swell, you might wanna throw away the battery right away because it takes a LOT of pressure for those things to deform. Typically there is the cap on those things that will pop out and disconnect the battery cell from the outer casing in these situations anyway so the battery pack is unusable at this state anyway.
This is one of the things I hate about the newer Li-PO packs... They all focus on packing as much capacity in a small package as possible but well those can just go and swell fairly common! Heat, overdischarge and overcharge just exaggerates the problem, hence why you see it a lot in high heat devices as well (such as the HP Zbook, Dell Precision, as well as laptops with poor thermals like some lenovo laptop or some Macbooks).
In my case, I fixed my friend's 2017 A1706 Macbook pro from severely swelling batteries after just 3 years of use (and 1 year of covid that it was mostly stationary) and it was an utter nightmare... I have to buy a fire extinguisher to exchange the battery!
https://imgur.com/a/poQBA7x

I inadvertently shorted out and incinerated a Li-Po cell once.... not recommended!!