Posted on 12/27/2023 7:51:54 AM PST by Red Badger
Picture this: you’re cruising down the Great Ocean Road in your brand new electric vehicle (EV), the ocean to your left and the wind in your hair. But what if I told you this idyllic drive could turn into a nightmare, with the faint smell of something burning?
This month we have had at least two large lithium-ion battery fires in Australia – one in the Sydney airport car park and another one more recently at the Bouldercombe battery storage site in Queensland.
When a lithium-ion battery fire breaks out, the damage can be extensive. These fires are not only intense, they are also long-lasting and potentially toxic.
What causes these fires? Most electric vehicles humming along Australian roads are packed with lithium-ion batteries. They’re the same powerhouses that fuel our smartphones and laptops – celebrated for their ability to store heaps of energy in a small space.
The reality is lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles are very safe. In fact, from 2010 to June 2023, only four electric vehicle battery fires had been recorded in Australia. A recent paper forecasts a possible total of around 900 EV fires between 2023 and 2050. This is, for all intents and purposes, a small amount.
Nonetheless, when EV batteries do overheat, they’re susceptible to something called “thermal runaway”. This chemical reaction can be triggered from faults in the battery – whether that’s an internal failure (such as an internal short circuit) or some kind of external damage. In extreme cases, it causes the battery to catch fire or explode.
The onset and intensification of lithium-ion battery fires can be traced to multiple causes, including user behaviour such as improper charging or physical damage.
Then there are even larger batteries, such as Megapacks, which are what recently caught fire at Bouldercombe. Megapacks are large lithium-based batteries, designed by Tesla. They are intended to function as energy storage and to help “stabilise the grid and prevent outages”.
The Megapack that caught fire on Tuesday is one of 40 lithium-ion Megapack 2.0 units on-site. A Megapack fire is daunting for obvious reasons. These have a capacity of 3 megawatt hours, which equals 3,000 kilowatts of electricity generated per hour.
It’s no surprise the Bouldercombe fire may be burning for several days.
What to do when a fire has started? If a fire bursts out in an EV or battery storage facility, the first instinct may be to grab the nearest hose. However, getting too close to the fire could spell disaster as you may be injured by jet-like flames or projectiles.
In the case of up-and-coming solid-state batteries with a lithium metal anode (instead of the more common graphite anode), these have a rather unwelcome talent for chemical reactions when they come into contact with water.
Instead of snuffing out the flames, water could actually fuel the fire and cause it to intensify. This is because the water’s reaction with the lithium can produce flammable hydrogen gas – adding more of a hazard to an already perilous situation.
While firefighters have used water on lithium-battery fires in the past (as it can help with cooling the battery itself), they have at times needed up to 40 times as much as a normal car fire requires.
It may often be safer to just let a lithium battery fire burn, as Tesla recommends in its Model 3 response guide:
Battery fires can take up to 24 hours to extinguish. Consider allowing the battery to burn while protecting exposures.
This could explain why Tesla advised authorities in Bouldercombe to not put out the blaze.
Water also conducts electricity, which means spraying it on a battery fire could lead to electrical shocks or short-circuits if the battery is not electrically isolated.
Globally, numerous solutions have been proposed for extinguishing lithium-ion battery fires. However, as of now, neither Australian standards, nor any other internationally-recognised guidelines adequately address fire extinguishing requirements for this purpose.
Importantly, the appropriate fire extinguishing method will vary depending on the type of lithium battery in question (such as lithium-ion, all-solid-state lithium-ion or lithium polymer).
For standard lithium-ion battery fires, the sprinkling of fine water mist may be used to suppress the fire. On the other hand, experts recommend using specially-designed Class D fire extinguishers for solid-state lithium-metal battery fires – or dry chemical fire extinguishers that are appropriate for electrical fires.
These contain substances, such as sodium chloride powder or pressurised argon, that can combat the challenges posed by solid-state batteries. Sodium chloride, commonly known as table salt, melts to form an oxygen-excluding crust over the fire. Similarly, argon is an inert and non-flammable gas which can help put out fires by suffocating oxygen.
That brings us to the aftermath of the fire – and another often-overlooked hazard: toxic fumes. When lithium-ion batteries catch fire in a car or at a storage site, they don’t just release smoke; they emit a cocktail of dangerous gases such as carbon monoxide, hydrogen fluoride and hydrogen chloride.
These fumes can be hazardous to your health, especially when inhaled in significant quantities. This is why these battery fires are a particular concern in confined spaces such as a garage, where noxious gases can accumulate quickly.
What to do if your car catches fire Although EV fires are very rare, if you do own an EV (or plan to in the future), there are a few steps you can take to tip the scale in your favour.
First, get to know your EV inside and out. Familiarise yourself with its safety features. Does it have a functioning thermal management system to help keep the battery cool? What about sensors that could alert you to a problem before it turns into a crisis?
Secondly, be smart about how you charge your EV. Avoid overcharging your battery as this can increase the risk of it lighting up.
If, despite your best efforts, you find yourself head-to-head with a blaze, your first course of action should be to call emergency services for professional help.
Correction: Since this article was published it has been updated in several places to better distinguish where the author is referring to solid-state (lithium anode) or lithium-ion batteries. A reference to fire risk from fast-charging batteries has also been removed.
The batteries generate their own oxygen from the metal oxides so that won’t work. Only way to stop them from burning is to cool them enough to stop the thermal runaway. For now, that seems to mean flooding the zone with water but I guess it only works if you can get enough water to the right spot.
“And how should they be fought?
Don’t buy them!
Minutes....................
“And how should they be fought?
Don’t buy them!
In the Navy, everyone has to go through firefighting and in the case of air wings, flight deck firefighting. If a magnesium flare is ever accidentally ever lit off on deck, the proper response is to simply wash the flare overboard with a high pressure fire hose. Which is of course impossible with a car.
“When insurance companies unite to refuse to insure electric vehicles, the market will collapse.”
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My son bought a Tesla, and he gets his insurance through Tesla. So it’s unlikely Tesla would refuse to insure its own vehicles.
I don’t know what the insurance policy (!) of other EV manufacturers is.
I have a lithium ion battery that I use to power a CPAP machine in the event of a power outage.
I have been aware of the incendiary characteristics of these batteries long enough to store it inside a fireproof century safe when not in use in the event that it decided to self immolate.
“Only way to stop them from burning is to cool them enough to stop the thermal runaway.”
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Just for the intellectual exercise, could an EV battery fire be cooled enough to suppress it with dry ice or even liquid nitrogen? How much of each would it take?
I got a chemistry set one Christmas.
Had a similar outcome..................😉
450-600 AA batteries ought be enough to power a Tesla with much less risk of catching fire.
“sodium chloride powder or pressurised argon,”
NO PROBLEM. Now we just need another two tons of salt to smother the fire or two tons of argon bottles to suffocate the fire. It is going to be great when we are all forced in to these. Insurance rates, electricity rates, brownouts.
Quiz: find one sentence in the article that explains what causes EV fires and why they are so intense.
The article says don’t overcharge the batteries. No EV charger is going to overcharge a battery.
Making the batteries self-quenching when a fire starts seems within the realm of possibility to me but is above my pay grade to even speculate about. Something worth mentioning is that they have formulations now that are much less prone to thermal runaway. In particular there’s one called LFP (lithium ferrous phosphate) that Tesla has started using in most of their vehicles. It also has the advantage of not using cobalt so it’s easier to source.
That will include pleasure craft (boats) once the actuaries have the data (sooner than later).
What about a truckload of baking soda?
Liquid hydrogen if you have some handy.
The idea of making cars that used radioactive material, radium, for fuel dates back to at least 1903. Analysis of the concept in 1937 indicated that the driver of such a vehicle might need a 50-ton lead barrier to shield them from radiation.[21]
In 1941 Dr R M Langer, a Caltech physicist, espoused the idea of a car powered by uranium-235 in the January edition of Popular Mechanics. He was followed by William Bushnell Stout, designer of the Stout Scarab and former Society of Engineers president, on 7 August 1945 in The New York Times. The problem of shielding the reactor continued to render the idea impractical.[22] In December 1945, a John Wilson of London, announced he had created an atomic car. This created considerable interest. The Minister of Fuel and Power along with a large press contingent turned out to view it. The car did not show and Wilson claimed that it had been sabotaged. A later court case found that he was a fraud and there was no nuclear-powered car.[23][24]
Despite the shielding problem, through the late 1940s and early 1950s debate continued around the possibility of nuclear-powered cars. The development of nuclear-powered submarines and ships, and experiments to develop a nuclear-powered aircraft at that time kept the idea alive.[25] Russian papers in the mid-1950s reported the development of a nuclear-powered car by Professor V P Romadin, but again shielding proved to be a problem.[26] It was claimed that its laboratories had overcome the shielding problem with a new alloy that absorbed the rays.[27]
In 1958 at the height of the 1950s American automobile culture there were at least four theoretical nuclear-powered concept cars proposed, the American Ford Nucleon and Studebaker Packard Astral, as well as the French Simca Fulgur designed by Robert Opron[28][29] and the Arbel Symétric. Apart from these concept models, none were built and no automotive nuclear power plants ever made. Chrysler engineer C R Lewis had discounted the idea in 1957 because of estimates that an 80,000 lb (36,000 kg) engine would be required by a 3,000 lb (1,400 kg) car. His view was that an efficient means of storing energy was required for nuclear power to be practical.[30] Despite this, Chrysler's stylists in 1958 drew up some possible designs.
In 1959 it was reported that Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company had developed a new rubber compound that was light and absorbed radiation, obviating the need for heavy shielding. A reporter at the time considered it might make nuclear-powered cars and aircraft a possibility.[31]
Ford made another potentially nuclear-powered model in 1962 for the Seattle World's Fair, the Ford Seattle-ite XXI.[32][33] This also never went beyond the initial concept.
In 2009, for the hundredth anniversary of General Motors' acquisition of Cadillac, Loren Kulesus created concept art depicting a car powered by thorium.[34]
The Chrysler TV-8 was an experimental concept tank designed by Chrysler in the 1950s.[1] The tank was intended to be a nuclear-powered medium tank capable of land and amphibious warfare. The design was never mass-produced.[35] The Mars rover Curiosity is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), like the successful Viking 1 and Viking 2 Mars landers in 1976.[36][37]s="Z3988"> - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_propulsion#Nuclear_pulse_propulsion
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