I skip years I do
I skip years I don’t like. 2022 is starting to look like a good candidate for skipping.
Another Ship is burning.
- Thread starter jssailem
- Start date
- Oct 22, 2014
- 23,145
I was on the Star Princess in 2006 when she burned. The lifeboat drill took on a new importance after that.
Lithium and water don't mix. We worked with that stuff at my first job after HS. As I remember we kept a bucket of sand in case of fire. Water either didn't work or made the fire worse.
Yet another why I don't want an electric vehicle!
Lithium ion batteries aren’t exactly the same as the elemental lithium that makes for “exciting” chemistry lab demonstrations. Water can be used to extinguish lithium ion fires in some cases (though Class B extinguishers are better). Elemental lithium or other Alkali metals, on the other hand, can definitely not be extinguished with water.
I don't think that's so. Check this video, where he takes apart a Li-Ion battery and drops the lithium into a bowl of water:
Lithium Batteries Dropped in Water! TKOR Exploding Lithium Battery Experiment!
Cool video, but those are elemental lithium batteries, not lithium ion batteries used in cars and most rechargeable electronics. Elemental lithium batteries need Class D extinguishers.
Here’s a reference that suggests lithium ion banks on the size of EV’s might be borderline for extinguishing with water, as there is a small amount of elemental lithium involved -https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-304a-safety-concerns-with-li-ion
One interesting quote is “A large Li-ion fire, such as in an EV, may need to burn out. Water with copper material can be used, but this may not be available and is costly for fire halls. Increasingly, experts advise using water even with large Li-ion fires.” So I guess if water is iffy for extinguishing a single EV using it for a car carrier full of them could be a no-go.
It may well be that you know more about Lithium batteries than me. But I can assure you that the batteries used in electric cars - Tesla, for example, which used arrays of 18650s for years, then switched to a different geometry, but essentially the same - are susceptible to combustion, and that water is not very effective, nor always a good idea, to extinguish the fire. The water being sprayed on Felicity Ace is to keep it cool as the fire burns itself out. No one is under the illusion that they can extinguish this lithium battery fire.
There's a good reason you can't carry a Lithium battery of more than 100Wh on an airplane.
You can get quite a bit of "excitement" from the combustion of a lithium battery of the kind in cars and computers.
You’ll get no argument from me there!
My point was just that Lithium metal, Lithium Ion (and LiFePO4 for that matter) are each different chemistries with different characteristics. Extinguishing a Lithium metal fire with water is a hard NO. Extinguishing Lithium ion with water is a maybe depending on size and conditions. Extinguishing LiFePO4 is less likely to be necessary in the first place because the energy density is lower and they’re less susceptible to the kind of thermal runaway and combustion as lithium ion.