A high resolution image from an Instrumental station shows the tight XY clearances to the battery. It's also possible to see the pocket formed by aluminum walls on all sides, which prevents the rough edges of the PCB from touching the battery pouch. (Instrumental)
An independent test by quality assurance firm Instrumental claims the Samsung Galaxy Note7’s issues have more to do with the phone’s design than with its batteries. Instrumental engineers say in a blog post that they discovered “intellectual tension between safety and pushing the boundaries” during a recent teardown of the smartphone.
The teardown showed little space between the battery and the rest of the components that the slightest pressure like sitting on the phone while in the back pocket could cause the polymer separator layers that keep the battery safe to come in contact with one another. The engineers found a thin shield protecting the battery, which could be seen as Samsung’s effort to mitigate the effects of pressure. But enough pressure applied could still squeeze the separators to a point where the positive and negative layers would touch and cause the battery to explode. Samsung hasn’t really been clear about what’s causing the Note7 to explode, this might give us a bit of an idea as to what happened with the beleaguered device.
Source: PC Mag