[Swordmaker]

“He had a very swollen lower jaw and lip, a small burn on his lip and a huge cut in his mouth,” says Russell. “A 2-centimeter [¾-inch] piece of his jaw was just blown to pieces.”

Something is very wrong here. The description of the wound here does not comport with what I am seeing in the 3D-tomography of the jaw wound and what I know of the way e-cigarettes are constructed.

The e-cigarettes have a mouthpieces connected to a tank like container with the juice, either a nicotine containing flavored, or non-nicotine flavored, vegetable glycerin or propolyn glycol. The battery is NOT close to the face.

Here is a typical commercial e-cigarette design:

As you can see the Lithium Ion battery is actually several inches from the lips and jaw. . . and nothing explosive should be anywhere close to the face.

The damage shown, and the wounds described, indicate to me that the teenage had something else in his mouth, perhaps the battery itself, not the mouthpiece. The jaw damage just is NOT accountable to a Lithium Ion batter explosion (they really do not explode, they burst into flame). The force required to break a jaw, one of the strongest bones in the human body, is much more than can be accounted for by the story told here!

He is MUCH more likely to have damage to his hand if the battery exploded than to his jaw, inside his lips.

Many of these e-cigarettes are user re-loadable. Is it possible this teenager tried to load this e-cigarette with something NOT suitable for vaping, that might itself be explosive? I think that is a distinct possibility.

My BS-o-meter is pegged and bent around the stop!

[1FreeAmerican]

“E-cigarettes contain lithium-ion batteries — the likely culprit in some 2,035 vaporizer explosions occurring between 2015 and 2017”

Seems like this ain’t the first time this has happened.

[UCANSEE2]

The jaw damage just is NOT accountable to a Lithium Ion batter explosion (they really do not explode, they burst into flame).

A pile of gunpowder that is lit will just burst into flame. BUT... if you put it inside layers of paper and then ignite it... BOOM. I suspect this is what happens with e-cigs. The battery ignites, but is sealed inside the plastic cartridge of the 'pen'. The expanding gas can't go anywhere until it bursts the plastic open.

BOOM !!!!!

[RandallFlagg]

This is the kind of regulated mod that I use:

(Can you tell I'm a gun guy?)
Anyhoo, it uses dual 18650 batteries, and has a safety feature that shuts everything down if there's any issue.
An UNregulated (Read: Mechanical) mod directly closes the circuit physically, and is much more dangerous.

[RedMonqey]

Kid could have been chewing on the wrong end.

Hey, I chewed on pencils(when I was in the third grade)

[phoneman08]

The batteries themselves do not explode. If shorted, they can vent rather violently. The danger is if the e-cig design doesn’t have adequate vent holes to allow the battery to flare (like a cell phone would) and not trap the pressure like a gun barrel.

Protection circuitry is a good safeguard but is not failure proof. Same goes for any device that uses lithium batteries but is relegated to a fire hazard rather than a projectile.