Thanks!

Thanks Oleksandr!

We did one full EV fire and the method worked great. Unfortunately the sponsor if the car did not let us show a video of their car on fire. Last week I was i Amstedam where NIPV made the same kind of extinguishing with the same succes. They will present both report and videos this fall.

@@perolamalmquist9043 Very helpful.

I know of a handful real fires and maybe 35 testfires in full EVs. The problem is that Tesla sold in the "it is impossible to put out an EV" so no one really tried to get it working until Renault installed their firemans access and then when we started doing our tests in Sweden. Now there are several places in the world that have started both tests and implementing it for real fires.

No Dave, not a false flag. I had the opportunity to overlook tests in this week where a Nederland Research Agency made the same full scale EV fire tests that we were not allowed to show. And with the same result. Two EVs with 100 % SOC, vehicles fully involved and they were extinguished by this method. Also, I have been involved in the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agencies work to make a fire brigade guidance based on our results. It was released last week.

I use both liters per minut and gallons per minute so US colleagues also can get a grip about how little water is necessary.

That is correct. There are several tools that can achieve water into the battery pack. Those tools are in some cases patented, but to get water into the pack is not a patent. Each tool manufacturer needs to develop a safe method for their tool.

Yes that would certainly be interesting. I would guess that there will be no big difference since we are not putting out the fire in the cell but rather cooling the not yet burned cells. And the temperature when we reach a thermal runaway are in both cases well above boiling point of water. that means that water will have a similar cooling effect in both cases. I believe the physical design of the battery pack and if and how water can flow is a more important factor than the battery chemistry.

Thanks for your nice start of your comments. Not! I will answer your comments anyway since I think they are good. - The chemistry is interesting, but not really for our experiments since it is not the battery itself we extinguished. We cooled the adjacent cells to a level that they did not ignite. The battery pack and modules physical design would be more important than the chemistry. - There is a myth that it is impractical, impossible and dangerous to make holes in batterypacks. But we showed that it is possible in some situations. Maybe not all since the vehicle logation and the possibilities to approach the vehicle can make it dangerous, and then it should not be done. - A car fire is not a raging inferno. It might look like that when you dont know anything about firefighting, but it is something that firefighters deal with all the time and dont find intimidating. So what we did when putting out the full EV was to first observe where we had jet flames from the battery pack and spend a couple of minutes putting out the majority of the car fire, then we used a Cobra cutting extinguisher to, with a water jet, cut a hole in the floor plate and into the battery pack and at the same time get water into the battery pack. It is an easy operation. Then we flooded the battery with 60 liters per minut a couple of minutes until smoke and fire disappeared while the other firefighter continued to put out the fire in the rest of the car. - Yes, a thermal imager was a good tool on the real EV fire that we put out. It led us to the correct area to make the hole in. But it wasn´t really necessary to be very accurate with were the hole was made since the water flowed in the battery pack and stopped the fire evan at places far away from the hole. I will be happy to answer more comments and questions if you have that. But please try some politeness even if you are on the internet. It makes life so much better if we are nice to each other.

Oh, and the reason we could not show the whole EV was that the sponsor of that brand new EV did not want their vehicles to show up on internet on fire, even if it was intentional testing. I wish that we could have shown that video because it really showed how undramatic it was to extinguish it. An EV fully involved where the fire started in the battery pack that has burned for 15 minutes, and ten minutes later the fire was out.

@@UtkikenRescue so you did extensive testing on an actual EV, but are unable to provide any evidence of said testing? Pardon me if we don't just take your word for all of your claims with no evidence...

@@michaelnoble2432 As I said in the video I was employed by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency during the tests and the project was run by that same government agency together with some national industry partners. Here is a link to the report in Swedish, were we also mentions the full EV burn. rib.msb.se/filer/pdf/30340.pdf It is to be released in English in the beginning of this year. You mentioned that the questions you raised were just a few of all the questions you had. I will be happy to answer the rest of them as well if you want that. I am not claiming that it is a method that will work all the time, but I would say that we have been mislead to believe that EV fires are impossible to put out all the time. Next step is to learn when the method is working and not working, and in Sweden the government Agency is about to release a guidance were this method is one way of dealing with EV fires when it is safe to use it.

@@UtkikenRescue thanks for the link - I'll read the report when it's available in English. It doesn't seem to cover the testing of the whole EV though, which was my main concern in my previous comments. Testing a battery pack sitting by itself on concrete is VERY different to a real EV fire. And STILL no information on the battery chemistry (NMC, LFP / LiFePO4 etc). You suggested it didn't matter, but this goes against EVERYTHING I've learned about battery fires (ie, the cell chemistry makes a HUGE difference).

Thanks Matt, I really appreciate your nice words! It is a good point about the smoke. I have been hesistant about what words to use since regular smoke can be flammable as well, when we have a fire/pyrolysis in an underventilated setting for example. So I figured that firefighters already know about different flammability properties of smoke, and that smoke is what we see and the properties of the smoke can vary depending on what the smoke contains in form of gases, particles and aerosols. But I really agree that it is important to point out that smoke from LiB are flammable gas.

Thank You! Yes, I think that makes it easier to understand what we are dealing with and to realize that we have many tools already to be able to make wise decisions, both in form of operations and prevention.

Thanks Marty!

Unfortunately the car company that sponsored us with the brand new EV did not want any images from the tests be shared since they thought it might be bad PR for them. Personally I would think it would be the opposite, good PR that they work seriously with fire safety. But unfortunately it was not my call.

@Scarastef, I was observing some tests this week that was successful again. And they were filmed. NIPV in Netherland will release both film and report about the tests.

@@perolamalmquist9043 thanks a lot for the heads-up! I will check it out as soon as it comes out!

In our tests it was collected and driven to the recycling/treatment plant and they took care of it. As you saw in the videos it was not much water. In Sweden we have not yet gotten to a good system for collecting and disposing of it in real life inicidents, but we are working to get there. Also to understand when it is useful to collect it and not.

I have tested those extinguishers and they do a really god job when the agent is allowed to reach where it is of use. i.e. on and inbetween the burning and nonburning cells. I think the question to ask is if the persons using them will be able to reach the burning cells at the right time with the extinguisher.

@@UtkikenRescue Good evening, thank You for Your feedback. Yes, I am afraid, that without proper skills and hands-on training there is no practical chance for ordinary people to tackle anything larger than mobile phone or maybe notebook :/

That is one of the big misunderstandings with lithium ion battery fires. That water is a problem for them. Water burns lithium in the form of metal, but not in the form of ions that it is in the batteries. So water is a cheap and efficient extinguishing agent to handle this kind of fires.

the biggest problem with water is freezing, and the pressure that might put on batteries... and actually causing problems.

There are some countries that are working with routines like that, and companies providing equipment for it. As I say in the video, there will be battery designs that cant be extinguished with interior water, and for them it could be a good solution.

you just need to take away energy and control fire/smoke spread -- water pool will help@@UtkikenRescue

I dont know enough about them to have a strong opinion, my thoughts are that many companies say they have made safer batteries than lithium ions, but when testing them in conditions outside the companys testing conditions they might have properties that not always are as good as they say. But I am a firm believer that we are working in the right direction and learning more and more and that fire safety is starting to be a concern for manufacturers as well.

Sodium just as all alkali metals react to water on contact. Sodium and potassium release even more energy on contact to water as they have more charge potential per diatomic particle. So you get more explosive booms with potassium and sodium. You can check it out cutting a piece of hard butter like sodium and popping that puppy in water. kzbin.info/www/bejne/a4bWg5yGhKt_oM0&ab_channel=EatsTooMuchJam