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The Morris Fire: Extinguishing Lithium Battery Fires

svetz

Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
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The topic of extinguishing Lithium fires has come up on two other threads, rather than derail those threads any farther started a new thread.

You've probably heard about cellphones, laptops, or EVs catching fire. While true, when it happens it's sensational so makes the news, it's a sensation because overall they have a pretty good safety record and it doesn't happen often.

By now you've probably heard about the 100 tons of lithium batteries on fire in Morris. The problem is, no one seems to know how to put them out, the solution is to just let them burn.

Morris lithium fire - ref
With the volume of the fire reduced, they decided to use a fire suppressant called Purple-K. “The lithium fire laughed at the Purple-K,” he said. “Didn’t make a dent in it.”

Firefighters then turned to high-flow water to cool the batteries, and planned to pour dry cement over a trouble spot on Wednesday night in an attempt to smother the fire, Steffes said.

The cement is to try and smother it, but that shouldn't work if the oxident is in it. They said they were making progress.

Listening to the interview now... best quote so far "no one knows how to extinguish these fires".


"When we smothered it with the concrete, we're not 100% sure that this thermal runaway is not continuing," Chief Steffes said. "It is probably continuing and hopefully it is going to consume what is left of the batteries underneath then it will be over. But there is a possiblility that as this continues that it does break through this Portland cement."

Update 1: The bed of batteries is 3' deep and 30x40'.

Update 2: Why Cement? Because they don't have dry sand and didn't want to put more water on it.
 
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Lithium fires are not new, there have about 60 EV fires since 2010 that are all listed on a Wikipedia page (compared to the 285,000 ICE fires per year).

From the other threads I've learned:
  1. As car fires, they're marginally safer as the fire is slower to start it allows more time for people to escape a burning vehicle
  2. Water is poured on them, not to put out the fire, but to keep other batteries cooler in the hopes of slowing it down.
  3. Dry chemicals to smother them don't work because they have their own oxident.
  4. its the liquid electrolyte in them that is flammable
  5. Most fire departments are unprepared for them and there aren't good solutions for putting them out.
  6. Different battery chemistries have different levels of risk, guessing LiFePO4 and LTO are probably the safest now. Solid-State batteries might be the safest.
 
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Found an interesting reference on fire dangers of battery types, I was right about LTO, but LFP wasn't #2, here's some highlights:

... thermal abuse of the 18650 lithium ion batteries with LiCoO2 cathodes by using VSP2, and found that the charged batteries were more hazardous than uncharged ones.

The cathode materials in the Li-ion batteries, such as LiCoO2, LiNiO2, LiMn2O4 (LMO), LiFePO4, Li(NixCoyMnz)O2 (NCM), are thermal unstable to induce autocatalytic reaction with the electrolytes and generate oxygen at elevated temperature. Jiang and Dahn12 showed that ethylene carbonate (EC), diethyl carbonate (DEC) in organic solvents can react with Li0.5CoO2 at 130°C, which is lower than the decomposition temperature of Li0.5CoO2. LiNiO2 also has a poor thermal stability. Ohzuku et al.13 have reported that Li0.15NiO2 undergoes an exothermic reaction at about 200°C. Zhang et al.14 compared LiCoO2with LiMn2O4, and the result shows that the latter has better thermal tolerance.

LiFePO4 has good thermal tolerance for no heat is produced in reactivity with electrolytes below 200°C[9] . NCM shows good performance on thermal tolerance as LiFePO4. Jhu et al.11 compared two cathode materials and found that the thermal explosions of LiCoO2 and NCM cathodes at 180 and 250°C, which explain NCM material act as a new cathode material with high safety performance.

For anode materials, Li4Ti5O12 (LTO) has excellent cycle performance and stable operating voltage. It shows more thermal abuse tolerance than graphite based on differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and gases generation analysis, which makes Li4Ti5O12 to be very promising anode material for large scale Liion battery[15,16]
 
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Reading this article about how one cell going into thermal run-away can produce enough heat to make a neighboring cell go into thermal runaway:

Once one battery cell goes into thermal runaway, it produces enough heat to cause adjacent battery cells to also go into thermal runaway. This produces a fire that repeatedly flares up as each battery cell in turn ruptures and releases its contents. The result is the release of flammable electrolyte from the battery and, in the case of disposable lithium batteries, the release of molten burning lithium.

Seems like an insulator between cells or having them submerged (e.g., if they went over 100°C the water would start to boil, but the neighbor wouldn't go over 100°C) might work. Also that if you catch it earlier enough water or CO₂ might work (in that it keeps neighbors cool enough until the on-fire cells burn themselves out). IDK....
 
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Until we figure out how to effectively put out large lithium battery fires we should strictly enforce separation/barriers/enclosures so a given cell fire cannot burn for more than 24 hours.

It would be better if the industry self-regulated than if the government had to step in and create regulations. Not just for safety, but publicity.
 
A lot of lithium batteries have pressure vents to let the electrolyte out. A while back I posted that they should be up so a minimum leaks out and that nasty stuff doesn't go all over the place.

Now I'm wondering if they shouldn't point downwards so all the electrolyte can escape and be channeled somewhere that it won't be as likely to catch fire (or if must burn, into some sort of kiln to contain it). Sort of draining the gasoline/oxidant away from the fire (and using the pressure of the fire) as the upper parts of the fuel burn off.
 
It seems to me that the cell casing and foils would moderate an electrolyte fire compared to electrolyte being concentrated into one pan.

Further, a small venting upright would pose no issues, but facing down it could result in a significant leak.
 
"LiFePO4 has good thermal tolerance for no heat is produced in reactivity with electrolytes below 200°C[9] ."
Am I understanding this correctly as no thermal runaway until the cells reaches 200C?
 
... a small venting upright would pose no issues, but facing down it could result in a significant leak.
That was the idea, if it could leak out away from the fire and stay cool it might not ignite. Ideally into some secondary tank so it doesn't make a dangerous ecological mess.

For example, let's go with what @smoothJoey said about 200°C for LFP (seems right from the article). So the first cell starts making a ton of heat and a fire in it and nearby cells is imminent (e.g., thermal run-away).

Imagine at 180°C the vents burst (before the ignition point, lower temperatures for other chemistries) and the flammable electrolyte drains into a bed of sand. The top layer of sand acts as a thermal barrier. Heat/flames rise, so fuel/oxident going down seems to make sense. Without electrolyte the battery should also stop making heat.

Won't work in a car battery, in an accident you can't really pre-determine what will be up or down. Perhaps rather than a bed of sand some sort of absorbent material so direction isn't as important? IDK....
 
"LiFePO4 has good thermal tolerance for no heat is produced in reactivity with electrolytes below 200°C[9] ."
Am I understanding this correctly as no thermal runaway until the cells reaches 200C?
Helo all,
I bought two BYD 5 kwh batteries from the guy who's warehouse burned in Morris illinois, 4 weeks before the fire.
I had an opportunity to look inside the warehouse to select and load my batteries.
This guy was the nicest person you could deal with, he gave me many AA, and AAA batteries extra, no charge.
He is financially ruined now.
I know why the warehouse burned.
It had a leaky roof. When I picked up my batteries, the weather had been dry for a week and there was standing water on the floor and dripping water from the leaky roof.
It had rained every day for two weeks prior to the fire. Heavy rain for two weeks.
There were dozens of pallets of used BYD batteries, each pallet had 8 to 10 , 163 pound, lifepo4 batteries.
Water and batteries don't mix well.

Look it up on YouTube, "Morris battery fire", Spectaular fire!!!!!
 
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