Featured No boat for you

A Prius battery is very reasonable cost wise to replace - it is not very challenging if you have electrical training.
It is also not hard to rebuild/repair the old battery if you have proper electrical training, tools (battery balancing chargers etc) and can follow online direction

2006 Toyota Prius Hybrid Battery Replacement - Best Hybrid Batteries




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also a wealth of Prius Battery reconditioning tools available

 

I'm not sure your reply is a reply to what Trollbait said. Trollbait's words, "Without a spark" (which you even quoted), would seem to be about the initial input of energy that begins combustion. You seem to be replying with the fact that combustion, once underway, is exothermic. I'm not sure I saw anyone doubting that.

 

'Cost prohibitive' isn't the same as 'costs more than car replacement'. Tesla packs that are referred to as structural are glued together; they are essentially one module. You can't open up the pack to replace just the problem module as is this case with many other pack designs. replacing an entire pack, case and all, is going to cost more than replacing just an interior piece that is a third, quarter, etc. of the pack's capacity.

As for shipping packs separate from the car. Any car with the structural pack removed is going to have a less stiff chassis, which could lead to damage during transit.

The AI also says this, "Oxygen-acetylene mixtures do not spontaneously combust but require an ignition source to ignite. Acetylene is highly ignitable, and a spark or flame can easily initiate combustion, especially when mixed with pure oxygen, which drastically lowers the required ignition energy. While acetylene can undergo explosive decomposition under high pressure (above 15 psi), this is a self-driven explosion, not true spontaneous combustion."

I wasn't speaking of spraying water into the pack. There are nozzles that are just under carriage washers sized for fire truck hoses. The spray is mostly for cooling down the battery by hosing down the under panel of the case.

A large portion of car fires don't involve fuel, traction batteries, or even other fluids. It is just all the plastics in the car burning. Hosing down the pack cools the battery. This will slow the reaction going on inside; doesn't have to put the fire out, or stop the thermal runaway, just get it small to more easily control. It also will keep radiated heat from igniting other fuel sources in the car. A blanket further helps but cutting off outside oxygen.

Yep. Putting out a fire by spraying water on it isn't smothering it. The water is cooling the fuel to the point combustion no longer occurs.

 

Thanks for the encouragement. I've rebuilt the battery once already and have all the tools including to charge and balance the whole pack, but the whole thing really needs to be replaced as now it's a whack-a-mole battery module replacement game.

But the car isn't worth it. The engine burns way too much oil and also needs replaced, the catalytic converter needs replaced (and this is a California compliant state, so no used cats and no aftermarket ones), I need to replace a wheel bearing, I'm still trying to fix issues with an accident that squished the front and I had to get a hood and fender and bumper and lights that still don't line up and I still need to replace the windshield, I'm having now several electrical issues and codes as the dash doesn't work nor can I see my speed, and now the water pump died yet again. So I need to just find the time to haul it off to a junk yard and forget about it.

 

I understand what your saying - I sold a 2008 Prius in 2019 after owning it for 12 years and 125,000 miles.
It still got 52 mpg but felt it was on a limited lifespan at that point.

I had to replace a wheel bearing on it - what a nightmare - because of the metals used on the hub and bearing assembly they basically weld together over time. Ended up in a Machine shop and finally after putting it in a hydraulic press and heating up the hub, it broke loose after about 2 hours of fooling with it.

 

@bwilson4web had his pack replaced by tesla, around 9k iirc

 

9k as in $9,000? That's good info to know.

Or did you mean 9k as in 9,000 miles?

 

$9,000. he has a thread on it.replacing-my-model-3-battery.254982

 

That's right, now I remember. And it sounds like with more modern monitoring apps and such that it would be possible to avoid the same problem if it happened again.

 

Not just monitoring apps, but the system itself updates regularly and adds such monitoring elements.

 

Unfortunately, it seems the Miss Daisy Disney car Tesla battery fire video is no longer available, I can't find it anyway. It was a clear example of the futility of trying to put out a battery fire that uses Cobalt in the cell chemistry. It simply sent cells launching out of the open top pack, until there were no more cells left to go off, even though the fire brigade was pumping water into continuously.

Any gas mixed with oxygen will ignite with sufficient heat, anyone who has oxy welded and had the tip of the blue flame enter the weld pool will have had the "pop" that blows the flame out, but waving it across the hot surface will reignite the flame, no spark required.

I the lithium cell puncture tests, generally carried out in someone's back yard, the glow can be seen inside an LFP cell, it requires a second hole to start the fire, that is to allow oxygen to entry and mix with the flammable electrolyte vapor droplets and pass over the glowing metal piece inside the cell.
Any lithium cell containing cobalt, only needs a single puncture to create a rapid fire front, the oxygen is being generated inside the cell and feeding the fire.

There is a video, some where, that an NMC cell is punctured, the wild flame shoots out, and they drop it into a container of water, it keeps on burning until there is no material remaining to create the flame, cooling it had no effect on stopping the fire at all .....

This video has LFP cells only being tested, it is very brand tilted and doesn't require much thought about which brand he is supporting.
Torture Testing Lithium Batteries: Do LiFeP04 Batteries Explode or Burn?
Not much thought went into the comments, and a lot of nonsense was said, but at the 13 min mark, you can see a pouch cell battery actually catch fire .... I'm guessing he actually arced across a few cells to create the spark to ignite the fire .... but it is clear for anyone who has seen hydrogen burn, this is not a flame with a high content of hydrogen in the vapor cloud. When he finally drops it into the tank of water ..... that he had there for just such an event happening, you can see the vapour still bubbling out

As for the nonsenses about the cylindrical cell being safer than the prismatic cell ..... the prismatic cell was 100Ah in a single cell, the cylindrical cell was probably around 6Ah, you can see how many strings of 4 cells in series are in parallel in that battery to make up the 100Ah

T1 Terry

 

As far as I can tell, we all agree with that: the initial input of heat needed to begin combustion can be a spark or any other event that supplies a similar amount of heat. In casual conversation, 'spark' sometimes stands in for the whole idea. My gas furnace really just heats a small electric element to glowing orange and then opens the gas valve to flow gas onto it.

 

Water and the blanket isn't about putting the fire in the battery out. They are for containing the fire to the battery pack. Keeping it from spreading, which is something fires want to do.

A battery fire can happen in a hybrid or PHEV. Should we just let the fire spread to the fuel tank because putting the fire in the battery out is impossible?

 

Anything flammable can, and should be, shipped in a manner that the risk of it blowing up the entire ship is low. How do they transport lithium cells, TNT, dinamite, petroleum, propane, and other flammables and explosives?

If the vehicle can't be shipped safely, then maybe we shouldn't be driving it. But I believe there is a way to ship them safely. There may be brands that are safe to ship and keep in your garage. The safer the vehicle, the better it is for everyone.

 

idk what caused the most recent ship fire, but it seems when new models come out, that's when the risk is highest.
and that's typical for all vehicles these days, let the public be the guinea pigs

 

That seems to be technology in general. And people seem ok with it until it doesn't work.

This is part of the reason everything now needs updates and so often. From operating systems to video games to your refrigerator's firmware and now cars.

 

A lot of the fires are damaged vehicle being shipped, these catch the rest on fire. The water lance video would have been good if they could have stuck to one vehicle fire out on the road, but that seemed to be more a sales pitch video for the product.
I did see they still used the fire blanket, they mentioned that no matter how much water the put on the fire, as soon as the water drained away, the fire reignited, so cooling the battery didn't put the fire out, it was still burning under the water.

I like the idea of a very small hole being made, that reduces the risk of adding more air and therefore oxygen, into the fire. Maybe flooded with liquid nitrogen might work better, but eventually, the battery needs to burn itself out.

The blanket saves a lot of water and contaminated run off, a combination of the blanket and liquid nitrogen pumped into the battery box? The nitrogen would fill under the blanket and suppress any other items like plastics and paint, from actually catching fire, maybe the liquid nitrogen would reduce the amount of associated heat damage.

Clearly, simply reducing the heat of a ruptured lithium cell that contains cobalt, will not extinguish the fire in the cell, but if the surrounding cells were kept cool enough to not join in, increasing the number of cells that had to burnout, the fire could be contained until the damaged cell finished burning the remainder of the material in it, then the fire would be both contained and extinguished.

Should all lithium batteries containing cobalt, have a nitrogen fire extinguishing system built into the battery?

The question has to be asked, why were lithium cells containing cobalt, with the known fire risk, ever be allowed in vehicles in the first place? LFP and LTO were already around at the time manufacturers jump on the cobalt band wagon because of the weight advantage ...... and the known reduced cycle life I'm sure came into the decision making, but it was up to govts to allow their use on public roads .....

T1 Terry

 

That's interesting...I had not heard that about making its own O2 until a few weeks ago.

This is where I first heard that. Matson apparently is a USA Jones Act company...we happened to drive by their Hawaii Big Island terminal last year on a vacation. :