Lithium-ion battery fires It can be intense and scary. As someone who used to repair second-hand smartphones, I’ve put out my fair share of burning iPhones with punctured lithium-ion batteries. And the kind of smartphone battery you have in your pocket right now is similar to the one inside electric vehicles. Except the battery in electric vehicles stores a lot more energy — so much so that some firefighters are receiving special training to extinguish the extra intense flames emitted by burning electric vehicle batteries following a traffic accident.
If you’ve been reading the news about electric vehicles, you’ve probably come across a lot of… Scary Articles About Battery Fires on the rise. Recently, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the California Highway Patrol announced They are investigating a Tesla semi-truck fire which caught fire after the vehicle struck a tree. The lithium-ion battery burned for approximately four hours.
Does this mean you should be concerned about the fire risk of your personal electric vehicle? Not really. It makes more sense to worry about a gas-powered vehicle catching fire than an electric vehicle, since electric vehicles are less likely to catch fire than their more traditional transport counterparts.
“Fires due to manufacturing defects in batteries are actually very rare,” says Matthew McDowell, co-director of Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center“Especially in electric vehicles, because they also have battery management systems.” The software monitors the different cells that make up an electric vehicle’s battery and can help prevent the battery from being overcharged beyond its limits.
How do fires occur in electric vehicles?
During a crash that damages an EV battery, a fire can start due to what is called thermal runaway. EV batteries are not a single solid brick, but rather a collection of many smaller batteries, called cells, pressed together. In thermal runaway, a chemical reaction located in one of the cells ignites an initial fire, and the heat soon spreads to each adjacent cell until the entire EV battery is burned.
Greg Less, director of the University of Michigan Battery Laboratorydivides EV battery fires into two distinct categories: accidents and manufacturing defects. It considers accidents to be everything from a collision that punctures the battery to a mishap while charging. “Let’s put that aside,” Less says. “Because I think people understand that regardless of the type of vehicle, if you have an accident, you can have a fire.”
While all EV battery fires are difficult to put out, fires caused by manufacturing defects are probably more concerning to consumers, because of their seeming randomness. (Remember when all those Samsung phones had to be recalled because battery problems made them a fire hazard.) How do these rare problems with EV battery manufacturing lead to fires at times that may seem random?
It all comes down to how the batteries are designed. “There is some level of engineering that has gone wrong and caused the cell to short circuit, which then starts generating heat,” Less says. “The heat causes the liquid electrolyte to evaporate, creating a gas inside the cell. When the heat gets high enough, it catches fire, explodes, and then spreads to other cells.” These types of defects are likely what caused the recent, highly publicized battery problem. Electric vehicle fires in South Koreaone of which damaged more than a hundred vehicles in a parking lot.
How to react if your electric vehicle catches fire
According to the National Fire Prevention AgencyIf an electric vehicle catches fire while you are behind the wheel, immediately find a safe way to stop and move the vehicle off the main road. Then, turn off the engine and make sure everyone leaves the vehicle immediately. Don’t delay things by taking personal belongings, just get out. Stay more than 100 feet away from the burning vehicle while you call 911 and request firefighters to intervene.
Also, you should not try to put out the flames yourself. This is a chemical fire, so a couple of buckets of water will not be enough to put out the flames. EV battery fires may require the intervention of emergency personnel. about ten times more water to extinguish a fire in a gas-powered vehicle. Sometimes, firefighters may decide to let the battery die. burn aloneinstead of spraying it with water.