“Standards need continuous improvement,” said Dan Doughty, a consultant on batteries who formerly served as a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories. “It’s going to be a constant struggle.”

The mobile phone industry follows battery design guidelines developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., a nonprofit group that works with industry to develop consensus standards for electrical equipment.

The IEEE guidelines cover design, testing and quality assurance and are designed to limit “battery failure under multiple stresses."

IEEE didn’t respond to requests for comment on its work in this area.

While Kaye’s statement didn’t mention IEEE, it said Samsung plans to share what it learned from its investigation.

Need to modernize

“Consumers should never have to worry that a battery-powered device might put them, their family or their property at risk,” Kaye said. “This is why we need to modernize and improve the safety standards for lithium-ion batteries in consumer electronics and also stay ahead of new power sources that will inevitably come along and replace these.”

Related: Is your product recall covered? Probably not

Samsung deserves credit for sharing its investigation results and offering to assist the industry, a “very rare thing” in the secretive and competitive mobile-phone industry, Doughty said.

That competition is at least part of the reason for the recent failures, according to Jim McGregor, a principal analyst at Tirias Research LLC, which conducts scientific studies for technology companies.

"If you can’t ensure 100 percent that the battery is not going to fail, maybe we need to design casing around it,” McGregor said. But right now, there isn’t casing available that would work in the space-constrained smartphones, he said.

Dozens of reports

The CPSC reached agreement with Samsung to recall about 1 million Note 7s on Sept. 15 two weeks after the company halted sales of the phones following dozens of reports of them catching fire or exploding. After replacement batteries had similar incidents, the recall was expanded.

As of Oct. 13, there had been 96 reports of Note 7 batteries overheating in the U.S., including 13 in which people were burned and 47 causing property damage, according to CPSC.

The consumer agency praised the efforts of Samsung and wireless carriers to push customers to return the phones. While most U.S. recalls have a “low” consumer response rate, 97 percent of Note 7 phones have been returned, the agency said.

Samsung investigation

Similar to what the company told the U.S. agency last fall, Samsung on Monday released the results of its internal investigation into the failures, concluding that flaws in battery manufacturing and design had led to short circuits causing the overheating incidents and fires.

The company said on Monday it’s focused on learning from its mistakes as it prepares to launch the next in its Galaxy S line. A spokesman on Tuesday had no immediate comment on the CPSC statement.

Lithium-ion batteries have been a boon to manufacturers of electronic devices because they hold power more efficiently and last longer than other power packs. At the same time, they have periodically raised safety concerns because the chemicals inside are flammable and they hold so much energy that a failure can cause a rapid increase in heat or even an explosion.

Related: Samsung sees $5.3 billion profit impact from Note 7 crisis

Kaye, who was appointed by President Barack Obama and is expected to be replaced as chairman by President Donald Trump, took the opportunity to urge Congress to give the agency more funding.

“We have great people and will do the absolute best job we can with our investigation, but unless Congress finally treats consumer safety as the priority it should be, we will not be able to match what Samsung has done by building a new facility for this purpose and using hundreds of engineers to test hundreds of thousands of phones and batteries,” he said.