Scientists declare to have cracked the easiest way to extinguish lithium-ion battery fires, an rising concern for hearth departments the world over, with ‘dry water’ the important thing to placing blazes to mattress.
Lithium-ion batteries are present in every part from cellphones and laptops to e-scooters and electrical automobiles.
They’re additionally the spine of large-scale power storage techniques, which shall be essential to serving to retailer power from intermittent wind and solar energy crops because the world strikes in direction of web zero.
However whereas their excessive energy density and lengthy life cycles have made them indispensable to the twenty first century, they tend to go up in flames. And after they do, they’re extraordinarily laborious to place out.
It’s because lithium-ion battery fires generate their very own oxygen. So whereas water-based hearth extinguishers assist calm down blazing batteries they will solely not often put out fires solely.
The publicity across the fires is already stoking fears amongst communities within the neighborhood of deliberate Li-ion storage tasks, with such issues now recurrently talked about throughout consultations.
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Fireplace departments worldwide have been scuffling with how greatest to deal with such blazes, with many now taking the method to easily “let it burn”.
Researchers from the Civil Aviation College of China imagine they now have a greater thought: dry water.
In a paper revealed within the Journal of Vitality Storage, the researchers stated that many different extinguishers have been regarded into for combating lithium-ion battery fires, together with foam, CO2 and dry powder. Nonetheless these all had “poor cooling results”.
Water has an “excellent cooling impact” and advantages from being environmentally pleasant and low-cost.
But it surely has a “deadly flaw,” which is that it conducts electrical energy, which may trigger exterior brief circuits of batteries and “result in secondary accidents”.
The researchers investigated the usage of dry water as an extinguisher for lithium-ion battery fires. Dry water is an air-water emulsion that appears like a really tremendous powder however behaves extra like a liquid when it strikes.
Dry water is just not very conductive as a consequence of its “discontinuous” state, stated the researchers.
It additionally evaporates quicker than liquid water, which brings a “higher cooling impact” in suppressing thermal runaway propagation.
Dry water subsequently “combines some great benefits of each liquid water (excessive cooling potential) and dry powder (low conductivity),” discovered the researchers, who stated it has “nice utility potential” to manage lithium-ion battery fires.
Lead researcher Xiutao Li tells Recharge that there are at the moment greater than 5,000 large-scale power storage amenities worldwide, with greater than 70 hearth accidents reported to have occurred.
The chance of a hearth at such a facility is subsequently 1.52%, he stated.
Vitality storage amenities can’t solely endanger life and property, however are additionally “important infrastructure” for energy networks, so there’s an “extraordinarily excessive value of trial and error” in the case of their upkeep.
With this breakthrough, Li stated his crew have discovered a “novel method for growing the best extinguishant for lithium-ion battery fires.”
