Ykick
1 GW
My condolences but what a video! Thanks for sharing it.
Lithium Battery Catastrophic Events - Summary Thread
- Thread starter bigmoose
- Start date
liveforphysics
100 TW
Pretty gentle energy release event. You're a lucky man it happened outside and so much of the bike looks usable after.
izeman
1 GW
is that a serious question?James_B said:
izeman
1 GW
ok. seems to be valid questionJames_B said:
. EVERY battery can get hot, smoke and can start a fire. it depends on the circumstances. some chemistry is more likely to go off in flames than others. also the amount of energy contained is important. the more energy it has, and the faster it can release it, the more heat can be generated. that's one of the reason why a small 1.2v nimh 0.1c 2000mAh battery is not as harmful as a 3.7v li-co 50c 5000mAh one. one is capable of 200mA and the other one can do 250A. those are ball park numbers of course, but you get the idea.and then it's the chemicals used inside, and how the physical structure looks like. soft pouch cells are easier to be damaged than hard case pack or cylindrical metal tubes. and the chemicals in those lithium battery are capable of a thing called "thermal runaway". once the get hot enough the will get even hotter w/o the need of additional external energy input, which then leads to bursting cells. and when this happens you don't need external oxygen. so it will burn even under water.
so this was the long story. every battery can burn, but the common knowledge is, that li-ion (mostly 18650 cells around here) are safer to use then li-co (aka li-po aka rc-lipo). for the 18650 search youtube for "tesla fire", for the the later one search for "lipo fire". second one will show a multitude of results - though it's a totally unfair comparison like apples and oranges.
and no. a thermal runaway can also happen when the cell is placed somewhere completely disconnected from anything. but this is very unlikely. more likely is a thermal runaway from already damaged, mistreated, over loaded and/or cells under a heavy load. the high internal resistance can make the cell heat and heat, and ... burn.
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