Internal Battery Swelling

Planning to buy a new laptop soon and I've noticed many models now enclose the battery inside the laptop chassis.

Most laptop batteries I've used over the past decade or so required replacement after a few years and even occasionally swelled up and had to be disposed of.

Is there a way to check for this sort of thing with an internal battery without having to open up the chassis?

 

Keyboard or bottom of laptop bulging out. Other than that, not really.

 

I'm pretty sure you will get a fault on the diagnostic well before that.

 

Not necessarily; it's common for a single pack to fail, not all at once (there's about four to eight of these). And there's nothing akin to sensors in the individual packs themselves, save the LiPo goo and (hopefully) the overcharge protection circuit. You might notice a sharp drop in capacity, but even this is unlikely as the expansion is gradual and it'll keep working fine-ish, just with sightly reduced capacity, which would happen anyway.

Really ... the only useful check is remaining capacity after calibration. Doesn't even matter if the pack started bulging or not; what matters is a pack with sufficient charge. Of course, "sufficient" is an arbitrary property.

One issue that concerns the no-plastic-enclosure designs; it is possible for the packs to leak. After exposure to air it'll harden and after that it's no longer conductive, so the risks are minimal. Also environmentally friendly stuff, so no concerns there either.

Some interesting user experiences here: Pouch cells.

edit:
AHA, eureka !!! Something just occurred to me ...

Yes! There is indeed!!!

See, the gas is hydrogen, so theoretically it's possible to measure the weight of the laptop; when it starts loosing weight then the hydrogen is lifting it (slightly) .