Re: battery fire

On 19/01/2025 6:25 pm, Sergey Kubushyn wrote:

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On 18/01/2025 9:37 pm, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

Jeff Layman <Jeff@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>

On 17/01/2025 21:42, Martin Brown wrote:
>

Lithium ion battery fires are virtually impossible to put out - you have
to let them burn out and use boundary cooling on the neighbouring
modules with copious amounts of water. Looks like this one managed to
get away from the fire fighters (which isn't supposed to happen).

>
We have no problem building large windmills at sea. Why not build the
lithium storage facilities off the coast too? The capital cost would be
higher, but once built they could be maintained in a similar way to
those on land. And if one caught fire, there's plenty of water around to
put the fire out, or at least keep it under control. For even greater
safety - and expense - they could be built as submerged facilities,
where any fire could be dealt with in seconds by opening a valve and
letting sea water flood the building.

>
I seem to remember from my chemistry lessons that lithium reacts
violently with water.  Containing lithium pollution of large areas of
the sea in stormy conditions (which is when catastrophic failure is most
likely to occur) might be quite difficult.

>
It wasn't lithium but sodium. Potassium was even worse. Lithium does
react in a similar way, but it schools didn't keep stocks of lithium
metal around fifty years ago, and probably still don't.

 What that word salad was supposed to mean?

The Liz Tuddenham wouldn't have seen lithium reacting with water at school.

Lithium reacts violently with water. Furthermore, it is lighter than ANY
liquid known to a man so it floats in EVERYTHING you could put on it. But
wait, there is more -- that black crust that it gets covered with in no time
when exposed to air is not oxide but NITRIDE. Unlike sodium and potassium
lithium readily reacts with both oxygen and nitrogen and it burns
spectacularly even in pure nitrogen, without any oxygen present.

But sodium and potassium react more violently with water.

The standard technique for dealing with a lithium battery that has
caught fire is to flood it with lots of water. Sea water contains about
0.17 ppm lithium, so lithium pollution isn't going to be a problem.

 Ever seen burning lithium? Good luck to extinguish it with ANYTHING.

Enough water dissipates the heat generated. It doesn't extinguish the fire - just keeps the fire-\ground cool until all the lithium has been used up

Especially with lots of water... It looks like you skipped your chemistry
classes at school and have never seen lithium metal yourself.

Despite having completed a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, I have never seen lithium metal. Sodium is more familiar - I had to get rid of chunk of it once, and tossed it into an open drain, where it briefly created a spectacular effect (as I'd expected).

Not just it
reacts violently with water, it FLOATS in ANY liquid, water included.

Probably not liquid nitrogen - which I have played with - or liquid helium which was too expensive for graduate students to play with when I was a graduate student.

You
can't FLOOD it with water for an obvious reason -- it is impossible.

Sure you can. It may not touch the surface for long, but it has to make contact to react.

The standard procedure with lithium fires is to somehow isolate it (protect
as much surrounding objects as possible, maybe push the burning mass to an
open space if possible) and let it burn until nothing left.

But you have to get rid of the heat and the lithium compounds produced. Lot of water works fine for that.

Just a month or so ago we had a truck loaded with lithium batteries
overturned and caught fire on a freeway. It took a whole day or two (don't
remember exactly) for our firefighters to push that burning wreck off the
freeway into the desert with a bulldozer. Then it took it almost a week to
burn out.
 Pollution is not all that much a problem and pretty harmless. There is white
lithium grease everywhere and nobody died from that :)

As I pointed out, seawater contains 0.17pm lithium (as ions). It's probably more now than when our primordial ancestors lived in the sea, but it's not a pollutent to get worried about.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney