Lithium battery factory fire 1

[3DDave]

Every dense gas displaces oxygen. FM-200™ is a whopping 170.03 g/mol vs O2 at 32 g/mol. It's even above SF6, the "Darth Vader" gas that is a mere 146 g/mol. Put some in a bucket and it's close to being able to float ping-pong balls. It will certainly float toy balloons inflated with air.

Maybe the concept is that very little is used so the depth in the room is low enough that the displacement is only ankle deep, but if anyone gets down there it'll asphyxiate them just the same. I get the idea that it is drawn by the convection of the fire towards the fire and, in small quantities, will be dispersed at a low enough concentration, but after the fire is out the rats are still going to have a bad day and descending a stairwell out of a room with this stuff deployed and a closed door at the bottom might be a final trip before reaching that door.

 

[TugboatEng]

I guess it depends on the depth of the space being protected. If it's 10 feet deep at 10% concentration then you don't have much to worry about even if you're in the bottom floor. If the space is 100 feet deep and you're at the bottom then you're going to have trouble. Not many protected spaces are so tall. If you are at the bottom of a normal space, don't trip.

 

[mfgenggear]

Enclosed areas and gases can be deadly.

 

[TugboatEng]

Enclosed areas without gasses can be deadly too...

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

When the halon system in a server room fires the whole volume has it while the siren is still going.

When it stops it starts sinking quickly.

If you get caught with out an air bottle you were meant to get yourself upside down until someone came to get you.

I have no clue how much they contained but they were pretty hot on the whole thing in both UK and Germany

 

[thebard3]

They wasted a lot of time screwing with the fire, first unstacking piles of batteries and then going after the expanding fire with an extinguisher that cannot possibly handle the job

I don't think it was a bad idea to try to unstack and scatter the fuel, but I agree the fire extinguisher wasn't going to do anything. The speed at which it spread was pretty incredible. Maybe the first line of defense should just be to run away since it looks like the factory was going to burn down anyway.

Brad Waybright

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

 

[mfgenggear]

I guess the question is how did and why did it combust.
Surely the storage was inadequate. And there was no contingency to a prevent and or contain a lithium battery fire. Folks don't park this thing on your garage.

 

[TugboatEng]

It makes you wonder about the risk from old electronic devices such as cell phones squirreled away in junk drawers.

 

[mfgenggear]

I did a little reading since this is not my deal. And the darn fumes from a lithium battery is very toxic.
Read a quote said that tesla recommended to just let the battery burn out.
So now I am concern of the two lap tops, two cell phones, and one tablet, I own.
So also reading if the temperature, or if the is a short, I gather from the on board circuitry. Darn things can combust. Knarley
If one of these things catch fire just run.
The fumes will or could kill you.

 

[hokie66]

It seems ironic that long life smoke detectors use lithium ion batteries.

 

[3DDave]

Pretty low risk for an old cell phone. The main initiator is an internal short circuit that allows the electrochemical release of stored power into some tiny spot in the cell. Old cells eventually self-discharge and remove that energy release as an option. The usual cause of that internal short circuit is the growth of lithium metal dendrites that pierce the insulator membrane and that most often grows during recharging so also a limited problem for stuff stored in junk drawers.

A stupid cause was by Samsung. While the write up in Wikipedia lists other causes (

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Note_7#Battery_explosions_and_recalls)

the contemporaneus coverage was that the cells they used for a cell phone (no relation) would fatten up slightly when they were charged. Unfortunately they had cells that were something like 0.1 mm too thick for the gap inside the cell phone and this put a large amount of squeeze on the little foil pack which got carried into the phone where the internal terminations were. I am unsure if that damaged the termination so that the charge current went through a smaller section due to ripping the termination or if it forced a hole in the insulator. They recalled millions (I think that was the number) of phones as several had already cos-played Johnny Torch on nightstands next to sleeping owners. I don't recall any deaths, but it was only a matter of time to reach certainty. What they said about welding and so forth in the Wiki article could be "fixed" by simply providing a battery replacement, but they didn't, indicating that it was the structure of the cell phone which they could not change that was a key issue. Anyway, some stupid causes.

The final one is the stupidest. It's been a while since vaping got crazy, but there were some trying for what appeared to be megaWatt outputs to challenge coal-rolling truckers using vape pens and some of these guys would put spare li-ion cells, without power limitation circuit caps on the ends, into their pockets along with spare change and keys, producing an external short circuit. Use protected cells - there is an attached circuit board, and don't put them into pockets or drawers with other loose metal items.

There are always the intermediate failures, phones spontaneously going off in pockets, but I think most of those are a variation of the Samsung squeeze and a bloated pack that probably made a noteworthy bulge in the shell of the phone. The laptop issued by my wife's work did that - it got to where it was a large radius spherical section; didn't rupture but it did get removed from the charger and taken for replacement right away.

Oh - a complete left turn on this. Again, a charging issue. At the start of the Gulf War the US Army made a lot of use of a device called a PLGR (Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver). The planners knew two things about this device. One is that, at the time, they would not be used at all, sitting in storage awaiting the call. They also knew that when the time came there would need to be reliable power for them and the users might not have access to external power. Smart people they were they created two battery packs. One use lithium primary cells and the other used lithium rechargeable cells and of course they are interchangeable in the PLGR. They also included the ability for the PLGR to be run from a vehicle power supply and recharge the rechargeable pack. This meant that lithium primary cells, which have a decade long shelf life, could be dropped to forward patrols and used immediately. This was the main inventory as the rechargeable ones didn't have a great shelf life/weren't in large supply - not really sure but they were relatively new.

The problem was that the designers did not make it impossible to put that device in a mode to charge a primary cell. Every so often someone would find a dead lithium primary cell and go to charge it up and it made it into a fire grenade. Since these PLGRs and their batteries were critical to an operation in a open desert with no distinctive land marks, this happened enough.

One of the contracts my company had was fitting PLGRs along with a bunch of other ELINT/SIGINT equipment into HMMWVs.

As an aside, it is my understanding that there weren't nearly enough PLGRs to go around for the Gulf War and so soldiers were asking family members to go and buy the sporting goods GPS navigation units and ship those. Rumor was the Arabs were completely taken off guard because they had never encountered a force that could organize across vast stretches of desert where they had experience in reading the landscape.

Back to the old-stuff storage - an area that should be of great concern is that electric bikes and scooters and so forth tend to get accumulated by humans thinking they can refurbish, repair, strip and sell parts, or are just obligated to collect fleets that landfills won't accept. There might end up a warehouse with 10,000 of those rental scooters owned by a company that has gone bankrupt.

Imagine this, but with batteries:

 

[3DDave]

"It seems ironic that long life smoke detectors use lithium ion batteries."

That seems unlikely. They should use lithium primary cells.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Yes, there is a big difference between Lithium Ion batteries and normal Lithium batteries. Lithium Ion batteries are rechargeable, regular Lithium batteries are not. But with respect to devices like smoke detectors using Lithium batteries, it's because that have a very long and stable lifespan, in the case of something like a smoke detector, that would probably be measured in years.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[Roga50]

I still have a fixed automatic Halon extinguisher on my boat (in the engine room). Had no problem getting it re-certified a few months ago. They are still pretty common and the certification company said there is no reason to replace it unless it fails the tests.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

A ship that had a little ion cargo fire

https://maritime-executive.com/arti...m-ion-battery-fire-sails-after-securing-cargo

 

[mfgenggear]

Dam they were very lucky. Don't have all the facts but it seems because it was enclosed in a cargo hold. They able to contain it with C02.

 

[Heaviside1925]

Shipboard fires like aircraft fires are a whole different beast. It was impressed on us in boot camp, that not all sailors are war fighters, but all sailors are firefighters (disappointing news to the kid who'd watched Navy Seals and Top Gun 1000 times each.)

 

[mfgenggear]

As a student of world War 2 and the the battles of the Great ships. Watching sailors trying to save their ship is and was amazing. Being there was substantial amount of damage with on board fires.
The fire suppression systems were amazing.
So were these sailors showing courage beyond the call of duty.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

There were 3 mobile devices fires last week on airlines in Europe apparently.