How to extinguish a Li-ion battery fire

[IDNeon357]

The reason a 7.1cal incident is so high energy, my estimate, is that it is much less than a second. Probably measured in milliseconds, so it's probably a 7000 cal/second event.

While a phone battery is popping off in about a second, so is about 4cal/second. (Or 14,444 calories an hour if it kept burning at that rate...which is impossible).

 

[Degenerate]

I was also thinking when we fly ... there's probably a lot of batteries in those overhead lockers, some a capacity of up to 160Wh.

My bosses went on a flight recently and the plane got delayed at the gate because someone had packed a powerbank in their checked in luggage.
They had to wait for the bag to be found and the powerbank removed before the plane could take off.
This was just a few days after the Conception fire, not sure if that's relevant though.

 

[IDNeon357]

My bosses went on a flight recently and the plane got delayed at the gate because someone had packed a powerbank in their checked in luggage.
They had to wait for the bag to be found and the powerbank removed before the plane could take off.
This was just a few days after the Conception fire, not sure if that's relevant though.

Pretty old requirement actually. Aircraft regulations deem the power bank to be a VERY low risk of fire. The only reason (stated in the below source) that it's not allowed in cargo hold is in the very rare case there's a fire, at least you can get to a fire extinguisher in the cabin. What Kinds of Power Banks are Allowed on a Flight?

If a person's battery caught fire in a plane I'm sure that'd make the news. So has it happened ever? What's Behind the Increase in Lithium-Ion Battery Fires on Planes?

Happens about 30 times a year according to FAA.

Also an example of one catching fire in a backpack shows that it barely even singed a hole in the bag....further illustrating my point I highly...highly doubt a battery fire caused the Fire with the Conception.

 

[tursiops]

Pretty old requirement actually. Aircraft regulations deem the power bank to be a VERY low risk of fire. The only reason (stated in the below source) that it's not allowed in cargo hold is in the very rare case there's a fire, at least you can get to a fire extinguisher in the cabin. What Kinds of Power Banks are Allowed on a Flight?

If a person's battery caught fire in a plane I'm sure that'd make the news. So has it happened ever? What's Behind the Increase in Lithium-Ion Battery Fires on Planes?

Happens about 30 times a year according to FAA.

Also an example of one catching fire in a backpack shows that it barely even singed a hole in the bag....further illustrating my point I highly...highly doubt a battery fire caused the Fire with the Conception.

Please excuse me if I am skeptical of your knowledge, reasoning, and conclusions. Your assertions and calculations and physics are not compelling.

 

[IDNeon357]

Please excuse me if I am skeptical of your knowledge, reasoning, and conclusions. Your assertions and calculations and physics are not compelling.

Yeah, that backpack sure burst into flames and brought down that airplane.

You'll have to forgive me if I just rely on basic obvious fact and observation.

Fact: 30+ battery related fires on Airplanes each year.

Fact: 0 fatalities or Aircraft related crashes due to 30+ battery related fires on airplanes each year.

Conclusion: Conception fire Extremely Unlikely due to Li-ion battery fire.

 

[dmaziuk]

Conclusion: Conception fire Extremely Unlikely due to Li-ion battery fire.

Similarly,
- there's gazillion flying rocks in space,
- in all of recorded history they never caused anything more than pretty light show in the sky,
- therefore it is extremely unlikely that the crater in Yucatan was left by a meteor strike. It must've been aliens dinosaur-testing their death ray bomb.

(Not that I'm buying battery as the cause of Conception fire: it could've started anywhere between the chargers and the generators, if it was electrical. But that doesn't make your reasoning sound.)

 

[IDNeon357]

Similarly,
- there's gazillion flying rocks in space,
- in all of recorded history they never caused anything more than pretty light show in the sky,
- therefore it is extremely unlikely that the crater in Yacatan was left by a meteor strike. It must've been aliens dinosaur-testing their death ray bomb.

(Not that I'm buying battery as the cause of Conception fire: it could've started anywhere between the chargers and the generators, if it was electrical. But that doesn't make your reasoning sound.)

Yeah, someone else can wait around 65 million+ years for a world ending meteorite to prove that after the 10s of millions of previous meteorites that have fallen to earth, this one...this 1 in billions of chances, is going to be it...

Instead, the fire was probably a dryer fire... The whole battery thing is the oddest statement I've heard to come out from whoever was the source.

My reasoning is completely sound.

Law of truly large numbers - Wikipedia

Basically stated, you CANNOT compare events that have very large numbers, to events that have relatively small numbers.

In 65million years (already a mind boggling staggering huge amount of time), maybe 1 billion meteorites hit the earth (a mind boggling staggeringly huge amount of objects).

You cannot compare such a statistic with the maybe thousands of lithium ion batteries that pass through a boat.

 

[dmaziuk]

Instead, the fire was probably a dryer fire... The whole battery thing is the oddest statement I've heard to come out from whoever was the source.

Not really: there are crap chargers and crap batteries out there, and they do flame up on occasion. The problem with airplane analogy is that in this case you'd have the whole lot of them in one place, charging, and nobody's watching. So if one did vent flame -- not impossibly -- it wouldn't be quite so unlikely to go out of control.

 

[IDNeon357]

Not really: there are crap chargers and crap batteries out there, and they do flame up on occasion. The problem with airplane analogy is that in this case you'd have the whole lot of them in one place, charging, and nobody's watching. So if one did vent flame -- not impossibly -- it wouldn't be quite so unlikely to go out of control.

Well let me be devil's advocate and side with you a moment.

A laptop has a much better combustion source, and is a likely item on the boat.


In this video it takes 10 minutes for the fire to even spread...10 minutes to set-up. By then the smoke is thick enough that the office is now virtually blacked-out.

Can many redundant systems fail? (The power bank area being more flammable than normal...books/papers/items. The smoke detectors not setting off. Etc?)

Certainly, the BOP failure of Deepwater Horizon proves that can be totally possible....very unlikely though. Very unlikely.

In a thread about flame sensors, this is why I just advocate those.

It would have set off as soon as the fire started, before there was much smoke. But as for the smoke, after 10 minutes there's more than enough to trip off smoke detectors which on average will go off after 5 minutes.

 

[IDNeon357]

Also the reason I advocate against the idea of a battery fire below decks is someone is going to wakeup to that and notice. It would have had to be at a charging station above decks in a salon when everyone was asleep for any of this to be possible.

A dryer fire is more likely because where's the dryer? In a hold somewhere out of everyone's away out of anyone's view.