Kip’s Comments - June 9, 2023

Technical Thoughts

Most of my week was spent at a very informative Local Emergency Planning Conference in Missouri. The easier way to describe the training was this was a hazardous materials training conference.

One topic of great interest to most of the attendees was a case study focused on the hazards of lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries see many uses - vehicles, laptops, most anything that stores power for later use. I use lithium-ion batteries in my camera and phone and, like most people, I appreciate their ability to store power. What I was not aware of was their danger, especially if a lithium-ion battery fails and goes into thermal runaway mode. When that happens, firefighters cannot effectively use traditional methods to extinguish a fire. In fact, our case study had the response team encasing the failed batteries in concrete!

There are articles on the Internet describing lithium-ion battery troubles. I found this one to be easy to understand and very closely matching what we were told in our hazmat training.

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-03-lithium-ion-battery-safety.html

I want to be clear that the lithium-ion batteries have a great track record. It is when the batteries are compromised that there are problems. Think car accidents, or phones dropped in a way that batteries are impacted. Those situations can be problems.

On a personal note, I wondered what would happen if my lithium-ion powered head lamp would overheat during use. If the battery was exposed to water/moisture due to an unseen/unknown case failure, would the headlamp burn me? Would I be able to react fast enough to remove it? And really, how much different would it be than a cell phone battery failing when carried on my hip or in my back pocket. Ultimately, one detail learned was to treat the batteries with respect and remove them from service when they begin to obviously bulge or fit-tighter than normal from physical changes - like one of my GoPro batteries. That battery will be removed from service before I have trouble.