Re: battery fire

On 19/01/2025 8:49 pm, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

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

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.

 I didn't say I had seen it but I had been taught enough about the
periodic table to realise that it would react with water.  There were
lots of other chemical reactions I learned about at school but didn't
actually witness.

If you had seen sodium and potassium reacting with water you might learned enough to expect that lithium would react less vigorously.
Jeroen Belleman has seen lithium foil reacting with water, but it has less thermal mass per unit surface area than bulk metal which introduces it's own complications.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney