Lithium-ion battery fire can be intense and scary. As a former repairman smartphoneI’ve put out quite a few iPhone fires with punctured lithium-ion batteries. battery. And the smartphone battery in your pocket today is the same as the one inside tram. Except, EV batteries store a lot more energy—so much energy that some firefighters receive special training to extinguish the intense EV fires that arise from burning EV batteries after traffic accidents.
If you’ve been reading the news about EVs, you’ve probably come across a lot of scary article about battery fire is increasing. Recently, the US National Transportation Safety Board and the California Highway Patrol announced they are investigating a Tesla tractor trailer on fire The car caught fire after it crashed into a tree. The lithium-ion battery burned for about four hours.
Does this mean you should worry about your personal electric car as a potential liability? fire hazard? Not really. Worrying about a gas-powered car catching fire is more meaningful than worrying about an electric car, because EVs less likely to catch fire compared to other traditional means of transport.
“Fires caused by battery manufacturing defects are actually very rare,” said Matthew McDowell, co-director of Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center. “Especially in electric vehicles, because they also have battery management systems.” This software monitors the different cells that make up an electric vehicle’s battery and can help prevent the battery from being pushed beyond its limits.
How does an electric car burn?
In a crash that damages an EV battery, a fire can start with something called thermal runaway. EV batteries are not one solid block. Instead, think of them as a collection of smaller batteries, called cells, pressed together. With thermal runaway, a chemical reaction within one of the cells ignites the initial fire, and the heat quickly spreads to each adjacent cell until the entire EV battery is ablaze.
Greg Less, director of University of Michigan Battery LaboratoryLess breaks EV battery fires into two distinct categories: accidents and manufacturing defects. He considers accidents to be anything from a collision that punctures the battery to a charging problem. “Let’s take those off the table,” Less said. “Because I think people understand that, no matter what kind of vehicle, if you have an accident, there’s a possibility of a fire.”
While all EV battery fires are difficult to extinguish, fires caused by manufacturing defects can be more concerning to consumers because they seem random. (Think back to when all those Samsung phones have been recalled (Because battery problems make them a fire hazard.) How do these rare problems in EV battery manufacturing cause fires, which sometimes seem to happen at random?
It all comes down to how the battery was made. “There was some level of engineering that went wrong that caused the cell to short-circuit, which then started to generate heat,” Less said. “The heat vaporized the liquid electrolyte, which created a gas inside the cell. When the temperature got high enough, it caught fire, exploded, and then spread to other cells.” Such defects could have been the cause of the widely publicized incident. Electric car fire in Koreaincluding one that damaged more than a hundred vehicles in the parking lot.
How to React if Your Electric Car Catches Fire
According to National Fire Protection AgencyIf an EV catches fire while you are driving, immediately find a safe way to pull over and get the vehicle off the road. Then turn it off and make sure everyone is out of the vehicle immediately. Don’t delay by grabbing personal belongings, get out. Stay more than 100 feet away from the burning vehicle while you call 911 and ask for the fire department.
Also, you should not attempt to extinguish the fire yourself. This is a chemical fire, so a few buckets of water will not be enough to put it out. EV battery fires may require first responders. about ten times more water to extinguish fires in gasoline-powered vehicles. Sometimes firefighters may decide to leave the battery alone. burn outinstead of pouring water on it.
