Lithium Ion Rears its ugly head in a Tesla S
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I believe it is best to wait until we get a bit more information on the cause.
The news media is on edge concerning Lithium batteries with the past reported battery fires in cars and aeroplanes. My wife laughed when she heard the 'negative' (no pun intended) press this has received. "How many other cars detect a problem and tell you to pull over and stop." :D |
I expect people will get overly excited about this, when they really shouldn't... Nobody gets excited when a gasoline ICE car catches fire ... well, probably the owner does, but it's not a big story when it happens. (No "gasoline rears its ugly head" stories)
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Tesla Model S, a collision with unknown metallic object...
...may have started the fire and again stoked the fears; the fire hazard of high-capacity batteries and crash survivability. Tesla's stock take the first hit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0kjI08n4fg ...the NHTSA will not investigate. They can't, they're shutdown. |
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I do not believe this car gave a warning. I just saw this last night:
http://i.imgur.com/sBcU8cN.gif I hope that everything works out for those involved. |
Any form of energy storage is potentially dangerous.
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Lithium ion batteries are particularly dangerous. You almost always have a big fire with them because the electrical energy discharges through the burning area feeding the flames. When they catch fire they spew toxic fumes. They also don't like it when you try to put them out with water. Other battery chemistries don't have this problem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ypUVpwgcAA |
The video shows pure lithium, that's not what is inside the battery.
Pure sodium reacts the same, but for instance salt (sodium chloride) is fairly safe. It is not the raw elements but what they are attached to that make up the properties. The whole chemistry so to speak. But Lithium Ion has weaknesses; it can overheat when overcharged or exposed to extreme heat or discharging, like what might happen if you cut open the battery pack and short some cells, what apparently is what happened in the stricken Model S. Had it used LiFePO4 cells that would not have happened. Those cells won't burn even when mistreated. Good for you that you could save your car from destruction by fire 3 times, If you ran petrol instead of diesel or if the tank were torn open and that caught fire, to compare it to what happened to the Model S, you would not have been able to. That an EV fire should not be put out with water is mainly because of the electricity, not the chemistry of the battery. The power should cut off in an accident, but when the pack itself gets damaged really badly there is nothing to fall back on. Better be safe and use only extinguishers suited for electrical fires. Petrol fires don't get easily put out by water too. The water tends to sink below the petrol, making that spread faster. It may even cause an explosion when it hits something hot; the steam stirs up the liquid petrol, etc. That is why car fire extinguishers often use powder; to trap all fluids and absorb the heat giving off non-burnable gases. I've seen a car burn out during the rush hour when I was young. The fire started at the engine bay but spread all over in about 15 seconds, and the gas tank exploded about 30 seconds later in a gigantic fireball. The heat from that was immense. Several people who watched the incident from about a 15 meter distance got first and second degree burns. Never mind the damage to other cars, trees, lamp posts and houses nearby. No battery can create that much havoc. |
It isn't just cars that can catch fire either. There are large quantities of fuel moved around by pipelines, road tankers and rail tankers. Some of each these have all caught fire.
When that happens it's much worse than a single electric vehicle fire. Wasn't there a fairly recent example in Canada - rail - that wiped out an entire town centre? That type of fire would disappear with electric vehicles replacing those gas powered ones. Liquid fuels in particular tend to spread the fire with the flow of liquid. I assume a battery fire will always remain pretty much localised near the vehicle. |
Tesla blog update
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That does it, now anyone knows that if there is ugly head rearing involved here, it is just Big Oil mouthing another piece of blabber.
They must get really afraid now for using these desperate tactics. |
It will happen with other cars using battery packs in the future.
Fire crews will just need to be trained on how to deal with it. |
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One gallon of gasoline has about the same energy content of 66 sticks of dynamite.
The battery in the 85kWh Model S pack is equivalent to about 2 1/2 gallons of gasoline. I think the only think more explosive than gasoline - is hydrogen. |
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An F430 burned on the highway here two years ago. The owner, being an avid Ferrari enthusiast, had an extinguisher in the passenger seat.
His companions on the road convoy, also being avid supercar enthusiasts, also had extinguishers. A few empty canisters later, and all that was left of the car was a smouldering pile of aluminum and steel. Once a gasoline fire gets going (and it's easy to start, simply through oil leaking onto hot manifolds), you will need industrial-grade fire extinguishing equipment to stop it. |
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If they work at all in the hands of inexperienced accidental fire fighters. But they weigh 1.5 kg with bottle and fitting. Even in a small country like Belgium, we have 5.5 million passenger cars on the road. All mandatorily equipped with a 1.5 kg fire extinguisher, makes for an extra 8250 (metric) tons being shuttled around. Think about the ecomod that'd be to delete them all ... |
I used to carry an old fire extinguisher around in the Honda Civic I bought from my parents.
It saw a few cars since until I started wondering if perhaps it would still function. It had the year of manufacture still on it: 1968... Oh, and it carried just 500 grams net. An easy pound and a half weight shed ;) |
The powder tends to clog in the bottom.
(bottom is relative to the position of the fire extinguisher, could well be along one side of the bottle) If it hasn't solidified completely, you can shake it free by putting the extinguisher down pretty hard. |
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JJ |
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Just for fun. Thinking about Li Batteries. Have you seen the LiFePO4 A123 pouch cell abuse video? I like the hatchet test part. :D http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=FKTJ-1ZJegw |
I think a good distinction to be made is that gasoline is an accelerant. Anything soaked in gasoline or lit on fire by it will burn violently. It seems the Lithium only set the "frunk" on fire, and it's contents (upholstery, plastic etc.) burned slowly using it's own much lower potential chemical energy. Compared to what gasoline would have done if present, it seems much more manageable.
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Wanted to join a local hillclimb series a while back. Balked when I saw that I needed a plumbed-in fire system. So much for simplicity... |
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I don't know about the emissions part... have you ever sat in a car with four other sweaty people? Eww. Especially after a drive-through burrito.
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From the EVDL, here is an excellent quote from the Tesla fire discussion:
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