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Battery Case Cracking???

kdub2051

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Anyone else experience the underside of their battery case cracking? Went out flying this morning and noticed my battery didn’t snap in place properly (lock) I could easily slide the battery out, I tried a second battery and the same thing happen. On closer inspection I noticed the split on the underside of both batteries. If I firmly press the batteries they both lock in place fine. The batteries are well past the one year warranty and I have three others that show no sign of cracking. Just something else to add to the preflight checklist.BF6FD703-6C92-4B80-857B-6E6FE9C2E6A9.jpeg8BAD7359-246E-411D-AE3A-1AE45532D8A8.jpeg
 
If you have not dropped them on a hard surface which could cause the shell to crack you should mount each one on the drone and check your battery status of each cell in the app to see if they appear balanced and at full charge. You no doubt have seen comments and warnings about drone batteries swelling up which indicates a deterioration of the unit. The old 2S, 3S, 4S drone batteries that had a shrink wrap plastic covering were easy to spot when the battery material began to break down and generate gases in the enclosure. And quite often you could not insert them into the drone without difficulty or at all due to their sponginess.

With the hard shell on modern drone batteries, a breakdown of the chemical contents generating gas pressure is not easy to detect....unless the pressure becomes so great it cracks the shell. I would say these two batteries have reached the end of their life even if you have not run them through a lot of cycles. Li-Pos will break down over time just sitting there with a charge on them. And although the smart batteries do self-discharge after a few days to prevent this deterioration from accelerating, batteries are just a consumable with a limited number of cycles or shelf life.

I'd send the photos to Autel and see if they recognize this as a pressure problem and the batteries going bad.
 
I'd say those batteries are swelling if the case is cracked. May be safer to just bin them and buy some new ones.
 

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