Re: battery fire

On 19/01/2025 07:25, 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?
 Lithium reacts violently with water.

Really? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxqe_ZOwsHs>
It decomposes water but there is no flame - unlike sodium and particularly potassium.
Furtermore, it is lighter than ANY

liquid known to a man so it floats in EVERYTHING you could put on it.

Let's be picky - it would sink in liquid hydrogen or liquid helium... ;-)
But

wait, there is more -- that black crust that it gets covered with in no time
when subjected to air is not oxide but NITRIDE.

See the above video. It's a mixture of oxide and 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.

Really? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4Vu9VJZFJE>
Note that even with prior heating it fails to burn. I've no doubt that if the temperature was high enough it would burn, but you can even get iron to burn (in air) if the temperature's high enough.

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.
Especially with lots of water... It looks like you skipped your chemistry
classes at school and have never seen lithium metal yourself. Not just it
reacts violently with water, it FLOATS in ANY liquid, water included. You
can't FLOOD it with water for an obvious reason -- it is impossible.

How many times have you see burning *lithium*? Not the organic solvents in lithium batteries, but lithium metal itself?

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.
 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.

If they had bulldozers why didn't they just push sand over it? That would have extinguished the flames. I guess they might have been worried about the organic solvents leaking out and spreading the flames; perhaps just leaving it to burn out was the easiest and safest thing to do as it was in the desert.

Pollution is not all that much a problem and pretty harmless. There is white
lithium grease everywhere and nobody died from that :)

? What white lithium "grease"? If you're talking about the fire in the desert it was probably a mess of plastic, nonflammable solvents, and sand.
--
Jeff