Battery 101: Demonstrations and Education for First Responders

A Personal Story

Yesterday, I was pitching our company to Kristin Lill at Reflect Ventures, and she asked, “What is the reason this company exists?? What is your reason for being?”? I told her that as batteries get more energy dense, and as the industry grows, the opportunity for safety events magnifies, and then gave the example of our e-bike project.

She stopped me in my tracks and broke in with a story.? “Last year,” she said, “my father bought my mother an e-bike.? They are getting older but still love to ride.? He put it on charge in the garage, and later that night it caught fire and the fire spread through the whole house within three minutes.”? Luckily, her father, mother and sister who were in the house all got out safely, but they lost everything they owned.? She was in tears as she told the story.

Later, in a LinkedIn message, she told me, “I asked God for a way to help my family. Additionally, that will not happen to other people. You answered that.”

“The fire spread through the whole house within three minutes”

I’ll come to other parts of Kristin’s story in other posts, but I want to hang on this statement here.? The NFPA sets a goal to have a fire engine on scene for a fire within 320 seconds, or five minutes and 20 seconds, after the call is processed by 9-1-1.? Not included in this time is the time for the fire to be noticed and processed by whoever is onsite, and the processing time at 9-1-1, which adds another 60 seconds.?

These standards and goals are appropriate for the leading causes of structural fires today—cooking, heating, electrical, smoking and candles.? Those fires start slowly, give off a lot of smoke when they are still small, and generally grow more slowly and give plenty of warning with appropriate smoke alarm systems.

Last week, we held our Battery 101 demonstration and education for firefighters—more on what it was next—and a key message from the instructors was, “When you get there, the fire will be in a much more advanced state than you are used to.”

Battery 101 Origins

When talking about potential demonstrations for our LithiumSAFE conference, the idea was floated about burning an electric vehicle.? As usual when an idea is floated, I didn’t immediately say “no,” but rather started asking questions like, “Is it safe?” and “How long will it take?” and “Are there other things we could ignite instead?”? In time, this led to a refined target demonstration of devices you might find in the home, except an electric vehicle.?

We called Brian Austin at the Greenville City Fire Department.? He liked the idea, but asked if we could do a practice run first.? “Sure, that makes sense,” I said.? “Would it be okay to invite a few firefighters to observe the practice?”? “Sure.? How many are you thinking.”? “Three to four hundred, probably.”? I just kept nodding.? When I realized he was serious, I suggested that, if we are going to get that many firefighters together to see the fires, we should also provide some training.? Images of me at the front of the room teaching organometallic electrochemistry to hundreds of firefighters seemed a little off key, so we decided to bring in the firefighting world’s best experts for the training, and Battery 101 was born.

The First Battery 101 for Firefighters

The morning started early, with firefighters showing up as early as 7 am, and coming in from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.? Two demonstration areas, each with two cages to contain the fires and a wide orange exclusion zone to keep everyone away from potential debris and off gassing.? When everyone was collected, there were over 450 attendees.? The demonstrations started small, first igniting a single 18650 cell, then a laptop battery, and then a lawn and garden tool battery.? The demonstrations were narrated by HazMat Lieutenant John Cassidy and retired Supervising Fire Marshal John Orlando from the New York City Fire Department, and they explained the concepts as the batteries heated up, vented, and then burst, only then shooting flames.?

Some of the concepts explained are listed below.? Most of these were new material for the firefighters.

• Lead up:? Before anything is observable, there is a lead up time in which pressure and heat are building within the battery.? While this energy is building, if there are not temperature sensors on the battery, there is nothing to observe from outside the battery while the pressure and heat build up.
• Off gassing:? Once the pressure builds and the packaging bursts, there is a “burned cherry smell” of the electrolyte and other gasses coming out of the battery.? While undetectable by a smoke alarm, a person can smell them, and Soteria will be offering lithium-ion battery fire detectors with sensors for these gasses later this year.? The hazards of these gasses, both for breathing and also if accumulated in an enclosed area, were discussed and presented.
• Ignition: When the heat is enough, the cell will ignite, generally igniting the gasses and giving a burst of flames and potentially debris.? This will go on until the fuel inside the battery is burned, and will ignite the other materials around the battery.?
• Detection:? The smoke from the jets of flames coming out of the battery generally burn too hot to create smoke that is detectible by smoke alarms, except in very high concentrations.? But the materials around the battery burning will create smoke that will set of smoke alarms.
• Cell-to-cell propagation: In batteries with more than one cell, the heat from one cell will ignite the others, creating a cascading effect that will continue the jets of flames and flying debris until all the cells are consumed or the fire is put out.

While the concepts are not new for lithium-ion battery engineers, they are very different from the curtains, mattresses, wood, carpet and other fuels that these firefighters are used to dealing with.? And they are important whether or not the battery was the cause of the fire, or just fuel for a fire started from a different source.

The demonstrations culminated in the burning of a golf cart battery, which burned for some time and gave off enough heat to soften the bottom of the metal cage it was contained in. (We used a cage-in-cage approach, so there was another layer of protection to protect the onlookers.)? Here is a short video of a portion of the burning time.

Four vendors also demonstrated their fire protection products.

• Viridi Parente: Viridi used one of their portable power supplies, supplied by Sunbelt, to power the event.? They also demonstrated their anti-cell-to-cell propagation technology by igniting a cell inside one of their modules and showing that the rest of the module did not ignite.
• DGeo – The Packaging Division of Labelmaster :? DGeo took one of the same lawn and garden batteries that we ignited, and placed it in their container designed for containing a battery in thermal runaway, and ignited it.? For the next 30 minutes, batteries inside their container continued to ignite, and while the gasses came out, the container kept everything inside completely contained.
• Renovo Energy : ??Ronovo showed their fire blanket. Unfortunately, due to a heater malfunction, the battery didn’t ignite so we didn’t get to see the blanket in live action.
• eFireX : ??eFireX showed their firefighting micro agent designed to put out lithium-ion batteries.? Two lawn and garden batteries were ignited and put out by the micro agent.? It did reignite several times, but each time was successfully put out.? This combined with a DGeo container could be a powerful combination, putting the fire out and then containing it during reignition.

An Afternoon of Instruction

In the afternoon, the firefighters moved indoors, where John Cassidy and John Orlando of the New York City Fire Department, Robert Rezende, MS, FIRESCOPE of San Diego Fire-Rescue, and Matthew Huyser, P.E. of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provided instruction on how firefighters should respond to different types of lithium-ion battery fires, from those ignited by personal devices such as e-bikes, to electric vehicle to large energy storage facilities.?

While I won’t try to recreate their training principles here, it was fascinating to me to hear them speak about the battery fires that I understand within the principles of firefighting.?

• Save people first.?
• Beware of the possibility of an exit route being cut off due to rapid fire expansion.?
• Pay attention to where the smoke is going—there is more to it than smoke.?
• Contain the growth of the fire.?
• Watch the structural integrity of the building, especially for large fires like electric vehicles in parking decks, etc.?
• Once it is put out, watch for reignition.? For large facilities, this may involve days of fire watch.
• Keep the building closed to limit oxygen.?
• Because of the chemicals, treat the remains of the fire as hazardous waste.?
• You will use a lot of water, watch where it goes as it contains chemicals that are hazardous to people, animals and the environment.

Those are just a few of my notes, and do not do any justice to the hours of valuable stories and concepts presented during the instruction period.

Talking with the Firefighters

As the event ended, I took some time to talk with the firefighters remaining, asking them how they viewed the event and information.?

• “I have six pages of notes, and I’m going to type them up for everyone else in the department.”?
• “It’s the most valuable day of training I’ve had since graduating from the academy.”?
• “This is coming, and its great to get out in front of it.”?
• “We’ve been experiencing what was described today but didn’t even know what it was.? This gives us a framework and strategies to deal with it in the future.”?
• “Please do more of these.? Everyone needs to see this.”
• “This program was one of the best I have attended and the topic info we received was priceless.”

And many other comments of a similar nature.?

I’m convinced.? We will be planning more, spacing them strategically both geographically and throughout the year.? We will keep them as inexpensive as we can, and work with local fire departments and state fire marshals to tailor the demonstrations and information to the local needs.

Now, for a short thank you to the Soteria team, who really did a great job organizing this and making it an event that was very valuable for the firefighters involved, by both planning and staging it well, and also bringing in such knowledgeable instructors. Thank you Karen Long , Abby Zielsdorf and Ashwin Pitts as well as the rest of the team. Its a pleasure to shepherd your efforts for our mutual purpose of battery safety.

If you would like to have an event like this in your area, or if you would like to participate by either demonstrating your fire suppressant and containment solutions at the events, or sponsoring the events, please reach out to Karen Long at [email protected].? We’ll keep you posted on our www.LithiumSAFE.net website, as well as on our Soteria LinkedIn page.