MIT professor says Boeing has two options for Dreamliner’s troubled battery

As Boeing rushes to find a solution to a battery problem that has grounded the company’s entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners, an expert said he didn’t expect the problem.

At a news briefing in Washington, D.C. Thursday updating the progress of their investigation, National Transportaion and Safety Board Chair Deborah Hersman called the incident “a very serious air safety concern.”

Hersman said investigators have found signs of fire, short circuiting and what is called “thermal runaway” or overcharging of the lithium ion batteries in their initial probe of the fire that caused an emergency evacuation at Boston’s Logan Airport Jan. 7.

Don Sadoway is a professor of material chemistry at MIT. He thought that the Dreamliner battery would have been engineered appropriately, despite the plane’s problems looking more and more like its engineering.

Instead there were solid walls where he thinks there should have been grilled walls or grates to allow for ventilation.

“That got me thinking it needed a little more robust thermal management system in place,” Sadoway told Seattle’s Morning News.

Sadoway said Boeing has two options as it moves forward.

First, they could re-engineer the cell stack, and stick with the lithium ion battery. Or secondly, Boeing has the option to go back to an old technology.

“Both of these options are going to take time,” said Sadoway. However, there are ways to “accelerate” the rate of correction, he added.

“Everyone wants to see this happen as quickly as possible.”