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Mavic Air 2 - Melted Battery

I have yet to update my firmware, see no need as of yet.

Aren't you interested in these updates

  • Fixed occasional issue: video was abnormal when recorded to aircraft.
  • Optimized Smart RTH
 
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You never record video to the drone's memory or SD card?
Not internal memory, no.

SD cards isn't what is rumored to be fixed.

I've never had an issue with mine. Oh wait, maybe one... For one second.


Melted battery vs. one second of lost footage....
Yeah, I'll keep my old FW
 
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You photos are duplicates of what my drone looks like. Dime sized melt through and noticeable heat damage on aft bulkhead of the drones battery compartment. Same scenario as well. overvtemp warning and emergency landing. Drone would not shut down nor could battery be removed.

placed drone in the freezer and that provided just enough contraction to get the battery out.

Now trying to get DJI support to respond.20200703_184550.jpg20200703_185748.jpg
 
A couple of days ago another guy has also reported the same thing after just 4 cycles, the same hole is melted out at the same locationView attachment 106654
I have joined the melted air 2 battery club Too. pics on my melt are in a later reply to this thread,
. Once is an anomaly. Twice is coincidence, three times is a trend....

UPDATE: dji is replacing my battery and the drone under warranty. They couldnt speak to cause but they did not hesitate at opening a case and offering a replacement
 
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Original poster here.

I have an update. The company the I purchased from, dronepoint.ca, agreed to exchange the drone based on a chat conversation I had with DJI. DJI chat rep said if I could get dronepoint.ca to exchange, then I should do so. The people at dronepoint.ca were very helpful and assisted me without much question as it was pretty obvious. That was yesterday, and now I'm setting up the brand new MA2. Couldn't be happier with the resolution from them, couldn't be more disappointed with DJI support on this.

At this point, I am trying to get a replacement battery for the melted one from DJI, so this is not a closed case yet.

I have also expressed with DJI my concern about the number of cases arising. Sure, in the grand scheme of all sales, probably not too many, but it seems like it is not an isolated issue.
 
Glad you have a resolution.

In my case, DJI opened a case on Monday AM online and I sent them the photos of my melted bits. No questions asked..... they are sending a new drone and battery.

They have asked for the drone back to do a post incident tear down. They would like the battery but it's safety to ship is suspect.

I was able to download my log data with Air Data UAV. In hindsight, the incident battery was very different in its temperature profile during flight right from its first use.

The good batteries went from ambient temp to ambient +15 degrees C during a nominal 24 min flight. The temp versus time plot was very linear: the slope is constant and the longer you fly, the warmer the battery gets.

The bad battery had three flights/ charge cycles on it from new. Its temp/time profile was way steeper. First flight went to max of 55C (ambient of 20C plus 35 degrees C). Next flight with the bsttery went to 62C ( ambient of 24 C plus 38 degrees C) and final flight went to 82C (ambient of 26C plus +56 degrees C). All increases were over nominal 15 to 20min flights in normal mode with primarily local hover (<450 m distance and < 120 m altitude) or slow active tracking modes ( < 450 m distance and 40 m altitude).

Voltage and Amp profiles for the incident flight were surprisingly normal and the data shows 40% battery left at landing. I'm not a computer type but I suspect so nothing funky in the battery PLC. One error message was recorded in the log about 30 seconds prior to landng and indicated a battery over temp. I'm guessing the temp was around 80C. GPS and compass traces were solid with no degradation noted or flagged.

I also checked the drone function after the incident with a new battery. All seemed okay EXCEPT the drone was quite unstable during quickshots. Wasn't able to keep in line for dronies and the rtn to start resulted in drifting and correction of +/- 3 meters in a 30 meter dronie. The drone was translating side to side quickly and correcting but it was very obvious on the footage that the drone was not stable in the manoeuvred although the gimbal and rudder functions did keep the target in the middle of frame. Wind at the time was nil.

I suspect ( but this is nothing more than a theory) that the gps antenna is in the compartment aft of the battery tray. I wonder/suspect the heat may have affected that module in some way.

Anyway, I now have my eyes keenly checking the good batteries for any sign of heat in that location. I will also periodically check post-flight files of the temp profile and see is the slope is changing
 
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It’s sad to see that this may be a trend. Yesterday I had the same issue during its 3rd total flight, 2nd battery ever. Does anyone know if going to a physical DJI authorized retailer/repair shop might expedite the replacement process? I hate the idea of possibly having to wait for a new one.

photos: Again, this was probably in its 30th minutes of total flight time.

1595734528559.jpeg
1595734559977.jpeg
 
Now THIS is becoming way to common now! I hope DJI work out what the hell is happening here and, if it is down to a bad batch of batteries, they do something about it! Mind, I’m not holding my breath!
 
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It’s sad to see that this may be a trend. Yesterday I had the same issue during its 3rd total flight, 2nd battery ever. Does anyone know if going to a physical DJI authorized retailer/repair shop might expedite the replacement process? I hate the idea of possibly having to wait for a new one.

photos: Again, this was probably in its 30th minutes of total flight time.

View attachment 108919
View attachment 108920
What firmware were you on
 
What firmware were you on

As of 7/24, everything should have been up to date. I am very new at flying, so it’s possible I may have missed something. But I do know I updated the firmware the night before I flew it.

Even if it wasn’t up to date, is it possible that a lack of being updated caused a cell to melt through its casing in less than 10 minutes? Again, I am new, but this seems more like a defect than anything.

I’m all ears!
 
As of 7/24, everything should have been up to date. I am very new at flying, so it’s possible I may have missed something. But I do know I updated the firmware the night before I flew it.

Even if it wasn’t up to date, is it possible that a lack of being updated caused a cell to melt through its casing in less than 10 minutes? Again, I am new, but this seems more like a defect than anything.

I’m all ears!
So I have not updated my firmware on purpose, for this reason.

It downloaded to the phone, but I never installed it to the drone.

I've only seen melted batteries on v1.1.5


I have no need for the new tracking features as all my flights are manual, that's why I bought it, was to fly it! It takes amazing pictures and videos too though, so that's a plus lol.
 
I do not think that firmware could have any impact that would cause a battery meltdown.. its more than likely an unfortunate bad batch of batteries that were not assembled correctly, causing a cell failure under load, which then leads to the meltdown.. Course, I could be wrong, your mileage may vary...

As far as a trend, DJI has probably sold thousands of Mavic 2 Air's in the past couple months, with thousands more batteries, (separately and in fly more kits) it only takes one bad batch to screw things up.. not sure how many reports have actually popped up other than the couple here... we know from cell phones (specially Samsung) that batteries can be volatile
 
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I do not think that firmware could have any impact that would cause a battery meltdown.. its more than likely an unfortunate bad batch of batteries that were not assembled correctly, causing a cell failure under load, which then leads to the meltdown.. Course, I could be wrong, your mileage may vary...

As far as a trend, DJI has probably sold thousands of Mavic 2 Air's in the past couple months, with thousands more batteries, (separately and in fly more kits) it only takes one bad batch to screw things up.. not sure how many reports have actually popped up other than the couple here... we know from cell phones (specially Samsung) that batteries can be volatile
Dji is now rounding back to me about my battery. They have replaced it and the drone under warranty but now engineering wants more details about the battery S/N. I can only read into this that they are trying to find the common node of the failures. There must be enough failures of this type to make them want to understand the root cause.
 
Dji is now rounding back to me about my battery. They have replaced it and the drone under warranty but now engineering wants more details about the battery S/N. I can only read into this that they are trying to find the common node of the failures. There must be enough failures of this type to make them want to understand the root cause.

Thats probably a good thing, I guess the question I see is, if they detect a trend, how many batteries does it affect, how many in a production batch, assuming of course, that its not some odd design issue, considering how long they've been creating batteries for their products. And can they easily contact customers that may have potentially problematic batteries, not all in a batch could be flawed..
 
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