THIS is the scariest thing about EV batteries (it’s not fire) | MGUY Australia
We’ve all seen EVS on fire a result of the lithium iron battery which provides the power to the car experiencing a condition known as thermal runaway this is when one of the individual cells in the battery is either damaged by an impact or just degrades over time to the
Point where it causes a short circuit this generates heat in the cell which causes an outof control chemical reaction to become self- sustaining very quickly the heat spreads to the cells nearby heating them to the point where they also go out of control in a kind of avalanche until frequently
The whole battery and the car is destroyed but believe it or not this isn’t the scariest thing that can occur when a lithium ion battery degrades or is damaged that would be a vce or vapor Cloud explosion as we shall see in this video Welcome Back to mg guy British
Engineer and lawyer turn Sydney YouTuber please be sure to like share and subscribe hit the notification Bell and drop a comment down below when a lithium iron battery is on fire the escaping cocktail of gases which are highly flammable are at least being consumed in a fairly controlled way as the flammable
Gas escapes it is burned in the fire and is therefore no longer capable of combustion this doesn’t apply to the toxic elements of the gases which remain a significant danger and are a separate problem to be dealt with by the First Responders however if these flammable components do not initially Catch Fire
They can accumulate especially when the vehicle is in a confined space such as a parking garage a source of ignition would then set off the entire gas Cloud resulting in a violent Vapor Cloud explosion referred to as a vce what’s amazing is just how much gas
Is produced from a battery as we’ll see in a minute it’s between 500 and 6,000 lers of gas for a single kilowatt hour of battery capacity and your average EV can have 60 70 even 100 kilowatt hours or more I’m going to hand over to Professor Paul Christensen an expert on
Advising First Responders on lithium ion battery fires you should watch the entire video at the link he doesn’t mince words at the start of the video he says that lithium ion batteries are quote thermodynamically unstable and shouldn’t exist unquote let’s take a look at the section on VC the next key
Point which I’ve been banging on about how much Vapor cloud is produced this is experiments we did at RF spear Adam the DMV site in Spring 2021 again nail abuse it doesn’t matter what kind of abuse again you will see the heavy metal nanop particles blasted out first
Now the LEL for the vapor cloud is believed to be between 6 and 11% I go the heavy in metal nanoparticles lower explosion limit but the L is way above the immediate danger to life and health got HF Etc what we realized from our experiments in the literature if you only part partially
Charge a lithium battery and you abuse it it need not ignite you can either delay ignition or it doesn’t occur at all then the hazards flip from fire to explosion from our research we reckon it’s between 500 and 6,000 L per kilowatt hour of vapor Cloud not including the small droplets of solvent
You always get two forms of vapor Cloud heavier than air and lighter than air and only one dominates and we don’t know how to predict this yet now you can see the heavier than air V Cloud imagine that in the bedroom cupboard on the third floor of a Terrace house with a
Battery energy storage system next to the hot water tank lithium ion batteries going the or become unstable at about 70° Centigrade now because you’re producing such a huge volume of gas if it doesn’t ignite immediately and ignition is delayed you get a vce and anything above 0.25 wat hours in other
Words anything of the size of an e scooter B battery or above you can get a VC this is in China the scooter is going into thermal runaway you’ll hear the popping of the cylindrical cells Now what happens if the gas gets outside and you have an unconfined Vapor Cloud explosion Tesla drove over some debris punctured the the battery case sometime later he parked up in a garage and up it went 6 seconds from the first appearance of The Vape Cloud three cars one one on one
Side and two on the other taken out wow scary stuff indeed as I say go and check out the rest of the video it’s very informative EV fires are hard enough to put out they often take hundreds of times more water to extinguish than a regular petrol or diesel fire the
Toxicity of the gases means that First Responders need breathing apparatus and cells can continue to reignite for days or even weeks after the initial far is out but what is truly scary is the prospect of an EV parked in an apartment block garage creating a vapor Cloud
Explosion in a confined space it’s bad enough when it’s just one EV but if we’re all being forced to drive them and the garage is full of them I just hate to think what might happen that’s it for this video thanks very much for watching I hope you enjoyed it drop a comment
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Prof Christensen video: https://youtu.be/AIXTP-TgPEw
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