As far as batteries in EV vehicles go: the German automobile association says "lotsa water" -- more water than on a conventional fuel tank fire. Cool them and they go out...
They also say that "Interestingly, the experiments failed to set the electric car battery on fire by externally applying fire. Only after massive mechanical damage to the battery housing was it possible to ignite the battery cells."
Thomas Prufer
Dunno, but on the IS, their phones are inside a supposedly fire proof bag. They have them, I understand in case an emergency landing puts them in some random part of the earth, and they can then talk to the mission control via the sat phones.
I don't think there is a lot you can do, since its a runaway chemical reaction. I remember seeing a demonstration of a nail gun being fired remotely through an old mobile phone. It was as they say, epic and the guy said there was no way to extinguish it apart from containing it until its fuel was gone. Probably OK for a phone, but what about everything else using these batteries these days, everything from hand held vacuums to scooters, ebikes and cars? Brian
QUOTE
28 June 2023London Fire Brigade (LFB) has been called to one e-scooter or e-bike fire every two days this year, an LFB spokesman said.
There has been a 60% increase in e-bike fires this year, "partially linked to [retrofitted] bikes".
To date, there have been 70 e-bike, 14 e-scooter and 35 other lithium-battery fires in London in 2023, according to LFB data.
ENDQUOTE
There's a big problem with Chinese ebike/escooter batteries. They're often no-brand cells of dubious manufacture, inside a plastic enclosure (no fire protection), with a very simplistic BMS (if they didn't just skip it completely), and then charged from a charger with just a DC barrel jack on it. It's very easy to charge them with a charger of the wrong voltage or current and there's minimal protection for that.
Basically they're often Aliexpress quality junk, which can fail explosively. Plus the buyer has no way to know if what they're buying is any good and, because the batteries are shaped to the particular vehicle's battery compartment, there isn't an open market of 'good' batteries.
If you can, it's a good reason to DIY your own batteries, since you then know exactly what goes into them.
Theo
And Chernobyl, but they were carbon fires. Not lithium batteries.
On 15/10/2023 01:21, Paul wrote: ...
The standard for most seems to be as difficult to get at as is possible. That is probably a result of trying to protect them from impact, but it does make fighting the fires a problem.
Now imagine what happens if we managed to build a battery big enough to power the grid for some days. Even if dispersed around the country to many sites an acre or so large, sabotaging one would require no more than putting a bullet through a couple of the units. Or dropping a bomb in the middle with a drone.
Isn't it strange that the MSM have, after several days, not come out with a definitive ID on the car that caught fire?
Whilst the meme 'it was a diesel Land Rover' is completely contradicted by the fact that no *plain* diesel car catches fire like that.
There is a massive amount of political and financial capital riding on the EV market. Don't expect to hear the truth anytime soon
Search for Australian megabattery fires, of which there have been two. Less bad than one might have thought. There’s loads of videos. Spacing out the individual packs seems to be a good idea.
Fortunately the costs - especially insurance - would well outweigh a nuclear reactor cost. Which is why we will end up with the irrational policy of wind turbines AND nuclear power.
No battery is grid scale. Realistically something like Dionorwig is
4GWh of storage, and no lithium in existence can match that.And that only keeps part of the grid alive for an hour or so. Lithium battriess are not there to store energy to keep the grid up for hours or days, but minutes or seconds to allow secondary plant to be brought up, and most importantly to stabilise the frequency so other renewable plant doesn't disconnect itself..
You know that. I know that. But to many, the problem of intermittency, assuming they're even aware of what it means, can be solved by "batteries".
There is a marked difference in quality between something designed with multiple protection, failsafes and active thermal management, and something sold on an unregulated overseas marketplace with no repercussions to the seller for problems and a race to the bottom on quality.
When you start talking about putting bullets and bombs into things, a lot of places with much stored energy can have similar results - oil terminals, gas pipelines, oil tankers, LNG ships, aircraft. For some examples, the gas plant lightning strike in Oxford last week, Buncefield, 9/11...
Theo
Its always easy to fool people without STEM education over technical matters.
they use binary boolean logic in their brains, such as they are, to think in lazy GrandConcepts, rather than doing the hard work of calculating quantities. Cancelling the people with messages they don't want to hear rather than analysing those messages and seeing if they inform.
Unfortunately. EVs are already horrendously expensive and heavy and adding chobham amour to the battery pack to make it proof against 'sleeping poliemen' ot shrapnel ftom a high speed car crash would just make them even more unsaleable than they already are.
Indeed, but nearly all those things need atmospheric oxygen to maintain a fire. Lithium batteries, in common with chemical explosives, do not.
That makes them a rather unique risk, to a STEM mind. ArtStudents of course wont understand the point
You're forgetting there is another battery type.
Flow batteries. (Vanadium, but there is some other chemical they're using as well.)
The Chinese are working on a hybrid (two battery types in the same plant) project, and it will hold 500 megawatt hours. And this is a prototype for experiments, rather than just a production item. The flow battery will be the major energy holder. I did not see a rationale or what this would be connected to. All I know, is they're building something. Presumably, one of the objectives is, that it be bigger than batteries build by other countries.
With a flow battery, the battery can be small, and the tank of solvated vanadium can be large. The larger the tank, the more megawatt hours. The fluid can be used for, on the order of twenty years or so (maybe 7000+ charging cycles).
The difference is, for this kind of storage, you can use "stationary batteries". They can have immense weight if you want. Unlike an automobile, where there is an advantage to a lightweight battery (since regeneration is not 100 percent efficient).
They could use lead acid for the grid, but since you and I know that immense batteries are silly, forget it. It's as silly as throwing a million refrigerators into an Arctic sea, to bring back the ice. Nobody can afford to build the "ten day battery".
The company that makes Vanadium flow batteries, says right on their web page that "this technology is NOT suited to grid scale storage -- it's for small projects in remote places". Apparently, other people don't agree with that opinion. So expect to see some efforts to build bigger ones and test them.
And they will keep looking for redox reactions which are cheaper to implement than Vanadium.
Paul
But, they might have had something sitting on the drivers's seat
you have read the same marketing bullshit that I have. Strangely cost and turnround effeiciency were not stated...
Exactly. Not chemical battery anyway.
And pointless when 500 tonnes of plutonium /enriched uranoium could keep the (existing) grid going for a year.
All chemical batteries have the same problem. If they are to be efficient, then the ability to take on and discharge high levels of energy quickly, will be an inherent inescapable property of them.
And that will men they are f****ng dangerous.
The great thing about piles of coal or tonnes of plutonium is that left alone, they cannot go bang without some extremely complicated kit surrounding them and considerable pre processing.
All other storage - hydro power, hydrogen, methane, natural gas, batteries, tanks of oil or gasoline can, in the limit, go bang remarkably easily.
Every way you look at it, the only sane practical answer is nuclear power. Shitloads of it.
But when were either politics or greed ever sane?
The pictures show that the fire is not inside the vehicle. It is under the left hand floor at the front. Do keep up.
Sodium Nickel Chloride batteries looked promising for static installations. They need to be heated, though to a lower temperature than other molten salt batteries, and in a large enough installation this requirement gets less relevant.
Unfortunately, the company developing and researching them was acquired by GE, so innovation was replaced by corporate treacle-wading.
I did some work with specially made small (think two C cells) versions for downhole use, kept in a long thin Dewar flask, but with limited success - the solid electrolyte is a bit too fragile for rough work. A pity, because the high temperature Lithium cells normally used are single use and very expensive.
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