"Microscopic 'Dendrites' a Focus in Boeing Dreamliner Probe", Wall Street Journal news story by Jon Ostrower and Andy Pasztor, quoting directly from their article, "Aviation safety investigators are examining whether the formation of microscopic structures known as dendrites inside the Boeing Co 787's lithium-ion batteries played a role in twin incidents that prompted the fleet to be grounded nearly a month ago. The new information from the National Transportation Safety Board offers a glimpse into what could become an important line of inquiry for the investigation into a Jan. 7 battery fire aboard a Japan Airlines Co. 787 Dreamliner parked in Boston."

1. Source = http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324880504578298673566960476.html
Microscopic 'Dendrites' a Focus in Boeing Dreamliner Probe
ASIA BUSINESS
Updated February 11, 2013, 10:45 p.m. ET
By JON OSTROW ER and ANDY PASZTOR
Aviation safety investigators are examining whether the formation of microscopic structures
known as dendrites inside the Boeing Co 787's lithium-ion batteries played a role in twin
incidents that prompted the fleet to be grounded nearly a month ago.
The new information from the National Transportation Safety Board offers a glimpse into what
could become an important line of inquiry for the investigation into a Jan. 7 battery fire aboard
a Japan Airlines Co. 787 Dreamliner parked in Boston.
Investigators have so far said they know that fire was triggered by short circuits, but haven't
been able to determine the original cause of the incident, or of another one in which an
overheating battery forced an All Nippon Airways Co. 787 in Japan to make an emergency
landing. Japanese investigators have said the battery in that ANA incident also experienced
an internal short-circuit and a "thermal runaway."
Dendrites are tiny deposits of lithium resembling microscopic whiskers that can grow within
the cells of a battery, potentially causing short circuits and significant heat and even fire. They
are often a byproduct of rapid or uneven charging of lithium-ion batteries, according to
experts.
Top NTSB spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said investigators are "looking at whether dendrites
may have been a factor in the short-circuits" that led to the Jan. 7 battery fire.
She stopped short of saying investigators have concluded that the structures were the
primary cause of the sequence of events that led to the Japan Airlines lithium-ion battery
rupturing and burning. But her comment suggests that safety board experts are now delving
into the issue as a major element of their overall probe.
Last Thursday, NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman spelled out the results of the malfunctions
inside the battery aboard the Japan Airlines Dreamliner. She said a number of short-circuits
inside one of eight cells touched off a thermal chain reaction that destroyed the battery and
damaged nearby parts of the plane.
At the time, Ms. Hersman also said investigators were casting a wide net looking for the
cause of the short-circuits, including how individual cells were charged, the physical
separation of the cells and their electrical interconnections. Dendrites were not explicitly
mentioned.
Chemical engineers, scientists and lithium-ion battery-designers have long studied and
written about the negative impact of dendrites, particularly on the efficiency and safety of
The Wall Street Journal Copyright 2013 All rights reserved

2. batteries designed for electric vehicles, and have documented potential hazards including
sudden short-circuits resulting in uncontrollable overheating of batteries.
"It takes time for the dendrites to grow and [the plane] can have several flights, and
everything's going fine and suddenly" there's a fire, said Professor John Goodenough of the
University of Texas at Austin, who is widely credited with the invention of the lithium-ion
battery.
"The critical factor is charging too fast on some cells," because "only one cell has to go
wrong" to create a problem, said Mr. Goodenough, who is still teaching at age 90.
Battery experts have enjoyed limited success in identifying clear-cut solutions to control the
growth of dendrites. Some technical papers have suggested using different electrolytes or
changing the chemical composition of other internal parts to impede the growth of the
microscopic tentacles. The safety board is receiving technical assistance from battery experts
at the Navy and the Department of Energy who, among other issues, have studied the spread
of dendrites.
But if Boeing ends up embracing any such solution, it could take extensive laboratory and
flight tests to persuade regulators to approve the new battery design.
A Boeing spokesman declined to comment, citing restrictions on its ability to discuss
elements of the NTSB's investigation.
The 787 is the first passenger jet to rely heavily on lithium-ion batteries. Boeing 787 chief
engineer Mike Sinnett said last month the company chose lithium-ion "because it has the
right chemistry" to discharge a large amount of power to start the auxiliary power unit in the
tail of the jet or even its engines "and then allow us to recharge that battery in a relatively
short period of time."
Mr. Sinnett, who said Boeing had never seen a failure of any of the lightweight lithium-ion
power sources in operational testing before the twin incidents in January, described the
multiple layers of "robust" protections built into the battery's design, including four layers of
protection to prevent overcharging or overly rapid discharging.
But the NTSB has called into question the certification of the batteries, specifically asking why
problems that originated inside a single cell resulted in a cascade of cell failures across the
unit, after being approved under the condition that such failures couldn't happen.
It isn't clear how much of the 787's battery testing concentrated on problems stemming from
the spread of dendrites. But starting five years ago, government researchers at the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado were focused on variables that influenced such
growth inside rechargeable automobile batteries, including charge rates, operating
temperatures and other factors. Around the same time, various companies were conducting
separate research to develop computer models and other tools to predict how short-circuits
could grow within a cell, potentially sparking thermal runaways.
Write to Jon Ostrower at jon.ostrower@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor atandy.pasztor@wsj.com
The Wall Street Journal Copyright 2013 All rights reserved

3. Lattice Energy LLC
Re: comment on appended Feb. 11, 2013, Wall Street Journal story by Ostrower & Pasztor
Dear Readers:
I must note that from what I have seen and heard from other people (and experienced battery
experts in particular) there is a substantial subset (perhaps the majority?) of battery thermal
runaways that aren’t caused by some sort of external mechanical abuse or external shorting
events that are most likely caused by some type of failure in the behavior of a battery pack’s
control electronics. No argument with the experts on that point.
That said, I am also told by long-experienced battery experts that there is an irreducible, albeit
much smaller subset of thermal runaways which were clearly not caused by any sort of external
physical or electrical abuse and in which, by any reasonable measure, the control electronics were
apparently functioning within spec and were not detecting any anomalies in monitored parameters
when a thermal event occurred. This subset is where an LENR ‘nano-fireball’ mechanism could
potentially be operating and serve as a proximate cause for runaway events. At the moment, I
cannot cite any anomalous post-event forensic isotopic data on runaways which would indicate
non-chemical processes at work. However, most if not all runaway investigations have employed
EDAX or the equivalent, not SIMS, so the evidentiary question is still an open one needing data.
I certainly wish more incident investigators would be on the lookout for telltales of non-chemical
processes as possible culprits, but if a runaway were in fact caused by just one 100 micron LENR
‘fireball’ at 4,000 to 6,000 Kelvin it might be nearly impossible to locate and measure the minuscule
amount of transmuted material left amongst the relatively vast macroscopic mass of debris in a
ruined battery cell. That is admittedly a daunting experimental problem.
What I can say with great confidence based on voluminous published experimental data
concerning LENRs as well as our own theoretical work, is that conditions and reactants that would
be very favorable for triggering LENRs in rare instances are absolutely, definitely present on
nanometer to micron-sized nanostructures (which include dendrites) inside batteries during the
course of microscopic or macroscopic internal electrical shorts.
One might reasonably ask, given that LENRs would most likely be rare occurrence at best, why
worry at all about the possibility that they might be happening inside advanced batteries?
In my view, depending heavily on their exact location inside a battery and composition of nearby
materials, the answer is that LENRs could serve as an extraordinarily hot ‘match’ with local
temperatures that are high enough to potentially be capable of directly initiating even more
exothermic metal-oxidation reactions that burn much hotter than a flammable electrolyte fire.
Unfortunately, such ‘thermite-like’, pyrotechnic chemical reactions with metals can be nearly
impossible to extinguish because they can generate their own Oxygen via dissociation as an
advancing flame-front combusts battery materials present inside a casing. In my opinion, that’s
where the safety danger lies with regard to possible LENR-triggered thermal runaways.
LENRs may well be a rare, “Black Swan” battery event, but it’s a rather deadly one. Hence, on-
board battery systems installed on human-passenger-carrying vehicles such as aircraft and
submersibles should ideally be designed with mitigation of this newly recognized type of safety risk
in mind.
Lewis Larsen
February 11, 2013
Lattice Energy LLC Copyright 2013 All rights reserved

4. Lattice Energy LLC
Addendum:
For further details, please see a 28-pp Lattice MS-Word document dated Jan. 23, 2013, regarding
LENRs, field failures, and thermal runaway fire/explosion events in Lithium-based batteries:
http://www.slideshare.net/lewisglarsen/lattice-energy-llc-field-failures-and-lenrs-in-lithiumbased-
batteriesjan-23-2013
Summary:
Low energy nuclear reactions (LENRs) can potentially provide another physically plausible
mechanism for producing so-called “field failures” that can trigger catastrophic thermal runaway
fires and sometimes chemical explosions in Lithium-based batteries.
Background on field failures in Lithium-based batteries:
There is a heretofore little-appreciated subset of Lithium-based battery problems cryptically called
a “field failure” mode that, while much rarer than ‘plain vanilla’ safety issues such as punctures
and other types mechanical damage or other electrical issues such as over-charging/-discharging,
etc., seems to be highly correlated with catastrophic thermal runaway events. According to a major
Lithium-ion battery manufacturer in a private communication, field failures apparently occur almost
randomly in roughly 1 out of every 4 to 5 million Lithium-based battery cells right off the production
line, regardless of their chemistry. This statistic has implications for battery safety that have been
under-appreciated in the past.
This somewhat obscure field failure problem involves catastrophic thermal failure of a single
battery cell. While it is often thought to be associated with internal shorts and electrical arcing
within a somehow defective cell, some battery manufacturers will admit privately that this peculiar
failure mode is not well-characterized and very poorly understood --- most of them are presently at
a loss for ideas about exactly how to definitively mitigate such a problem. It is well known that if just
a single cell in a large, multi-cell battery pack fails in this particular manner, it can potentially trigger
an even more catastrophic large-scale thermal runaway event that rapidly propagates through an
entire battery pack, destroying adjacent cells via thermal fratricide as well as possibly the entire
interior of, for example, an all-electric motor vehicle.
LENRs may be involved in presently indeterminate subset of Lithium-based battery failures:
This additional new source of concern about the safety of advanced Lithium-based batteries has
arisen because, in the course of our company’s ongoing R&D efforts, Lattice has applied the
Widom-Larsen theory of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENRs) on a practical level to try to help
better understand the possible role of nanoscale metal dendrites and nanoparticles in certain types
of rare failure modes that may occur in smaller Lithium-based batteries as well as in extremely
large, multi-thousand-cell battery packs utilized in certain all-electric vehicles and some military
applications.
Technical questions are welcome.
Lewis Larsen
February 11, 2013
1-312-861-0115
lewisglarsen@gmail.com
Lattice Energy LLC Copyright 2013 All rights reserved