I have read all the arguments about these batteries for a couple of years now and I have changed my thinking about what to hope for if my Earth X battery self ignites, a lot of folks say steel enclosure for the battery but mine is in this custom homemade aluminum one. So now if this battery self ignites, and burns through the box, I hope I can identify this fire and hope it WILL melt through and then I can pull a momentary 6G pull up to drop the battery out the bottom and switch over to my internal 20 AH backup battery.............wishful thinking but its a thought......any thoughts on this madness.......?
I have temperature strips directly on the EarthX900 on the firewall. It has not seen 130F since installed Feb 2016 even in an AZ summer....
The authors found that thermal runaway occurred when the LiFePO4 battery surface was heated to a temperature of about 126 ?C (=259 ?F). I would venture that your aircraft battery is unlikely to ever see that temperature absent a fuel- or oil-fed fire (in which case you may have bigger problems to worry about).
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I was wondering at what temperature the lithium batteries self destruct during thermal runaway. I was wondering if an aluminum case will contain the battery meltdown without melting itself. It will be vented.
Thanks.
Johan
I have temperature strips directly on the EarthX900 on the firewall. It has not seen 130F since installed Feb 2016 even in an AZ summer.
So now if this battery self ignites, and burns through the box, I hope I can identify this fire and hope it WILL melt through and then I can pull a momentary 6G pull up to drop the battery out the bottom and switch over to my internal 20 AH backup battery.............wishful thinking but its a thought......any thoughts on this madness.......?
If you are talking about something like EarthX LiFePO, then it probably will.
Here is a plot of some batteries forced into thermal runaway and the temperatures. The non Fe batteries (typically) have higher energy per mass and that results in higher temps during runaway. Also, the electrolytes can self ignite on discharge of these higher energy batteries causing fires. Note the excursion line for #1. It appears it began its thermal event around 100C.
Let me know if you want the full report. Lithium Cobalt had peaks around 850-900C - not counting fires. To be sure, Ross has it right: sealed, stainless, vented overboard. Earth X offers aluminum.
Every time a person asks a question about "Lithium battery", I cringe a little, because I know the next post will be about fires, explosions, and all manner of dangerous things. But there are many different types of Lithium batteries, and they all have different characteristics. Misinformation - especially on the internet - abounds, mostly because, yes, there have been fires associated with many (but not all) Lithium battery types.
If the OP is talking about Lithium polymer batteries, like you find in RC models, then yes - there have been lots of fires. If he's talking about liFePo (Lithium Iron Phosphate) batteries - that's "iron", not "ion" - as are becoming popular in lightweight starter batteries, it's a different story. People carelessly use all these terms interchangeably, thinking it's all the same stuff, just spoken with different accents. But they are different. There are a couple of popular stories floating around about in-air fires in experimental using "Lithium" batteries, but no one has been able to find out exactly which batteries these were, as the people reporting on them are always talking second or third hand.
So be precise in your questions, or the answers you get back will just confuse the issue even more.
So to the OP - which batteries are you talking about?