The world is full of counterfeit Apple products. We CT scanned two fake AirPods and compared them to the real thing… 🧵

RT @JoeTransue: Amazing tech, and an excellent use case. While I am a big proponent of electrifying things, it is important to pay attenti….

Curious about industrial X-ray CT technology like @lumafield's? Here's a quick explainer video:

Here's our full analysis again: And if you want to learn more about what's lurking inside batteries, check out more resources here:

Anker probably buys 100 million+ lithium ion battery cells every year, contracting with major manufacturers over the long term and supplementing stock with opportunistic orders on the spot market. Keeping track of battery quality at this scale is a nightmare!.

The use of different battery suppliers in a single SKU highlights the liquidity of the lithium-ion battery market. It’s highly competitive and made up of several enormous manufacturers, many smaller ones, and lots of “rewrappers” that buy out-of-spec products from the big.

It’s normal for the design of consumer electronics to evolve without a change in SKU, though this makes it hard for distributors and retailers to phase out old stock. That’s fine as long as the revisions are minor—assuming there are no safety issues.

Two of the recalled battery packs have cells with 4 vent openings on top, while one has only 3 vents.

We also found evidence that Anker used at least two different battery suppliers in these power banks. One example contains battery cells with reinforced cores (the bright vertical lines near the center of the cell on the left). The others have unreinforced cores.

Among the battery packs with flat tab connectors, there’s significant variation in the distance between the positive and negative tabs—a potential short circuit risk.

For instance, the recalled products we scanned use flat tab wire to connect their batteries to their PCBs, but the non-recalled products use insulated wire and solder. The design of the PCBs also varied.

The PowerCore 10000 is a very popular product that was made by the million between 2016 and 2019, and sold through 2022. All of the power banks we scanned had the same model number, A1263, but they were not the same product inside!

TLDR: there isn’t a smoking gun. None of the batteries in the recalled units had obviously unsafe characteristics. Instead, this is a story about the complex supply chains that underlie modern products, especially in batteries. Here’s our full analysis!

If a contaminant is introduced during manufacturing or the film is wound unevenly, it can cause a short circuit between the layers. This can lead to rapid discharge, overheating, and potentially fire—making even small defects a serious safety risk.

Lithium-ion batteries must be manufactured to extremely tight tolerances. They’re made by winding thin films of positive electrode (cathode), negative electrode (anode), and separator into a tightly packed “jelly roll” that's sealed into a cylindrical can or rectangular pouch.

Last month @AnkerOfficial recalled over one million power banks due to an unspecified battery manufacturing issue. We CT scanned 3 recalled power banks and 2 that weren’t recalled to see what’s going on inside. Here’s what we found…

RT @lumafield: What’s your go-to charcoal for the 4th of July?. Even if you’re not a pro, you know there’s a difference between a generic b….

@lumafield This was a quick experiment we ran at @lumafield using 3D printed portafilters (since stainless steel would make it hard to capture details in the coffee pucks). It'd be fun to design a real experiment with an expert like @jimseven or Lance Hedrick!

This occurred to us! We CT scanned an espresso puck that was just tamped without distribution (left) and one that was prepared with WDT (right). The red dots are microscopic voids in the pucks. The non-distributed puck is about 2% void by volume, and the WDT puck is 0.25% void.

We had a blast hosting @DJSnM at @lumafield to CT scan some mysterious space artifacts! His explanation of how CT works is one of the best I've seen.