Samsung’s investigation into what went wrong with the Galaxy Note 7 is expected to be published next week. The report is light on technical details of what exactly went wrong, but it should be of no surprise that the exploding battery issue is down to a battery fault. The separator layers allow ions (and energy) to flow between the positive and negative layers, without allowing those layers to touch. Compressing the battery puts pressure on those critical polymer separator layers that keep the battery safe. Samsung stated that these separator layers may have been thin to start with due to aggressive manufacturing parameters.” Instrumental's blog post explains.

Source: Forbes January 16, 2017 12:48 UTC