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EV battery fires are currently significantly harder to deal with than ICE. The concerns are warranted and require fire departments to develop new tactics to dea
by practicemaths 2y ago
EV battery fires are currently significantly harder to deal with than ICE. The concerns are warranted and require fire departments to develop new tactics to deal with them.
Effectively, the batteries hit a point where they thermally runaway, catch fire, and won't go out until their temperature is reduced to below the thermal runaway threshold.
This currently requires a massive amount of water, like on the scale of dumping the burning vehicle into a lake or pool.
However, solid-state batteries ought to eliminate a lot of this concern.
- theshrike79 2y agoNo no. It's perfectly simple to put out a lithium battery fire: you spray enough water on it just like any other fire. What the water dumping is for is making sure it doesn't re-ignite on its own, it's not needed for the immediate firefighting at all. People imagine firefighters picking up a flaming EV with a crane and dumping it into a container of water - it doesn't work like that :D
- practicemaths 2y ago"What the water dumping is for is making sure it doesn't re-ignite on its own" Yes, hence why I said it requires lowering the temperature to below the threshold for it to re-ignite. Here's one submersion system: https://www.garrisonflood.com/ev-fire-fighting-water-submersion-pool https://www.garrisonflood.com/ev-fire-fighting-water-submers... It requires a significant more water to put them out. Hence it's more efficient to just submerge them in water than it is just dumping water on top of them.