It's great to see these kinds of tests, keep them coming! I think the big win of LiFePO4 isn't that it doesn't burn - clearly it does, it's that it doesn't erupt violently into a gigantic ball of fire like lithium cobalt/manganese does. Looking forward to the overcharge testing!
In normal use case like the battery is overcharged or overdischarged or short circuited i believe it won't catch fire like this. Crushing the battery can only happen if like u have an earthquake and your home collapses but then u have more things to worry about than just a fire 😂.
Exactly - a bunch of 18650s would react more violently. Sure, this will still burn your house down lol but it doesn't seem like it would be as intense as e.g. those Tesla fires, given you had an equivalent amount of these batteries
Yeah, this huge cell would have become a massive firestorm if it was li-ion. Lifepo4 on the other hand seems pretty docile and doesn't really react much even to extreme abuse.
Great test & interesting results. I saw a YT guy accidentally bumped his lab power supply dial up a bit after setting up 16 brand new 280A EVE cells for their final top balance of 3.65v when something fell over & bumped it up to 4.6v for the next few days until he returned to find them all looking like footballs. So he decided to use them and see how they go and after a year of pretty heavy use & abuse he managed to squish them back slowly to a reasonable size and shape, he did tests to see how much life was left in them and he still got 255 amps total from these highly abused batteries & only lost 20-30 amps. I thought that was pretty amazing & a credit to there output ability all things considered.
I'm impressed with how puncture-resistant the cell was. Took one hell of a wallop with a very pointy, very heavy crowbar to cause enough damage to puncture it. Thanks for doing this test! I'm not discouraged by the result; I'm still going to install a house battery bank on my cruising sailboat of 4 x 280 Ah Eve cells.
Awesome! It was a good test to do considering this cell had damage terminals and nothing else wrong with it. Now we all know and can plan our systems out to be safer as a result
I have punctured LiPO batteries which are very different many times. I have noticed that leaving the cells shorted with something metallic it makes it worse. If you would have removed the tool it might not have caught fire at all. I feel like leaving the cells shorted allows the current to create more heat than just a plain puncture.
You should open up the aluminum casing and see if all the cells caught on fire. I bet the reason it caught on fire was not a second short from the second piercing but from the impact of the second piercing forcing the air inside the case to blow out the hole from the first piercing. Like blowing air on a smoldering ember. It increased the temperature high enough to ignite the electrolyte.
I'm happy to see that they don't explode, and with a proper temperature monitoring system in place I believe something like this could be taken care of quickly if it happened in a home storage Solution. BUT this is one of the reasons I am building a mini power station outside ( like a 5x4) little building outside, because you never know if your going to be out of town, I rather lose all my equipment if need be, than my house, maybe a little over paranoid, but it is what it is lol. Great Video, seeing things like this helps the community a lot!
I doubt that you could control it . The output of toxic gas in any confined area would drive you away from doing anything unless you had a proper breathing mask and air tank . Also lithium battery fires are very hard to put out . Tesla cars can burn for days . A test like this in the open air of a small battery is nothing like what would happen in a confined area like a camper with a bank of much larger batteries that will all go up and set the whole thing on fire . You are wise to build a separate battery storage area .
The reaction they will also vary alot in the chemical composition the manufacture use apart form the main Lifepo4 as well as the battery design. I've seen lifepo4 explode and i have seen them only smoke. That's why its important to know the brands of the cells.
I was told they won´t burn, which is wrong, they burn, but using oxygen comeing from air. Which is much better then the others which provide their own oxygen, but you really cannot say that they are totally safe because they cannot burn at all. Thank you for making that clear.
Yes you are correct. what we discovered was that once the electrolyte was vaporized by the heat of the first puncture that it changed its properties a bit making it now flammable. we believe the second puncture created some small form of a spark that caused those vapors to ignite. Realistically in a real world situation the second puncture wouldn't come later on, imagine a vehicle accident where everything happens all at once
Nice test. Would have been great if you also tested how easy or hard it is to put out a LiFePo4 fire. I live in a basement and this is what scares me the most about lithium batteries.
Interesting test. The first hole caused venting, and severe heating of the plates... the second hole caused the venting to exit the glowing hole and the vapors passing over the red hot plates ignited the vapor. Now we gotta wonder WHAT the electrolyte is...
@@adamrak7560 if the electrolyte is solid the ions are embeddee solid. thats the reason high current capable cells will always have a fluid electrolyte. like lead acid. a flooded lead acid with lead plates hanging in the acid solution can provide high cranking amps. an lead AGM battery does so aswell because the electrolyte is soaked up in the glassmatt (AbsorbantGlassMat). but try high currents on a lead gel type and not only wouldn't it provide the amps because of the voltage sag, it would also damage the plates from deep discharge. Soooo: solid state high current batterys are a fairytale and will about never happen. solid battery electrolyte has the same energy level as solid water -ice-. so nuthin' at all. can't supply a pressure washer or water jet with a solid block of an element.
Many sellers on Amazon advertise 12V LiFePO4 battery packs as a replacement for lead acid gel cell alarm system backup batteries. It appears to be an extremely dangerous practice to substitute a LiFePO4 battery into the alarm system without knowing anything about the compatibility of the charging circuit (which is designed to work with lead acid batteries) with other battery chemistries such as LiFePO4.
Good point, although LiFePO4 batteries should have their own internal Battery Management System (BMS) that takes care of over voltage/current conditions. BMS are programmable, so some may have been tuned to work with lead-acid chargers. But as you said, I would hesitate to use a Lithium chemistry without doing thorough DD on legacy equipment.
It would have been interesting to see if you could extinguish it and whether it would reignite. I just bought a Bluetti and they say you can extinguish it with a regular dry chemical fire extinguisher. But they do not say if it will reignite.
It was only when the second puncture was made that it went up in flames. I've seen countless batteries puncture tested, but never more than once. Did you ever find out what happened to those bigbattery cells? This is actually one of their 170ah Lishen cells.
Nasty chemicals huh? I was thinking the same when i saw him puttting the battery on the bare ground. Then that electrolyte and vapor was spilling all over the place. Am i the only one thinking this ain't cool at all? Although it looks like a desert, there a still animals around who may drink from water puddles further down the hill after rain falls. Could have used a piece of sheet metal to cover the ground or smtg. Sorry, maybe I'm too european or green to approve this.
And who are you trying to tell me what to do? And why am i misinformed? I'm just referring to the above comment which clearly states "nasty chemicals". Sorry i don't have my own channel yet so i'll leave my comments wherever i want, even if you don't approve. Really sorry pal. And if I'm so terribly misinformed and you're the genius you probably think you are, why don't you enlighten instead of offending me? I'll give you the answer right away: because it's simple and a simple mind is what you are obviously.
Late to the game, but it's clear how nicely the electrolyte burns. How do people think that solid state batteries will make anything safer other than preventing the calm bonfire of the liquid electrolyte?
For what it’s worth, lead acid can also explode due to gassing hydrogen just like propane, diesel and petrol. All forms of energy storage carry a fire risk in the right conditions. What is much better than Lithium Ion is that it appears to lack the explosive run away fires. Basically, treat any form of energy storage with respect.
I have a lithium iron phosphate battery 8Ah this was very helpful to me of knowing what these batteries do without any protection. Thank you for the tip
Good test, good to see. Definitely is a fire hazard, but not to the same degree as other lithium. I guess the electrolyte can vary between manufacturers, but the cathode shouldn’t release oxygen to create a super hot self sustaining fire.
Not bad, I feel much battery upgrading my UPS to LiFepo4. As someone who works in the industry, LiPO and Lithium Ion in phones and power tools are much more hazardous when the flame starts, that phone your on can shoot a 4ft jet flame in your ear so, heads up
I have been toying with changing out my dying diesel in my sailboat for an electric system as I don't use the engine except to get out of the marina and maybe an hour tops during the day. Fire on a boat is extremely bad so it is one of my concerns with electric. I would like to see an attempt to extinguish this battery as one of the things I do not like is that batteries seem to contain all the reactants necessary to burn so smothering them or cooling them doesn't extinguish them. With a diesel the automatic fire extinguishing system does work to some degree.
The problem was your second stab, it created internal pressure because the spear was in the hole and it mostly went out the first hole pushing the fire with it. On an Internal error the flames would be contained i guess.
I dont think there is any high density battery that wont burn if badly punctured. Pr definition a battery stores energy, and you have to assume that a bad puncture will equal a full short. That energy has to go somewhere. That doesn't mean that there isnt battery chemistry that is safer than others, but thats more in terms of how likely is it to critically fail over time, wear and demanding conditions. When a failure does happen there can also be large differences in how agressively it burns, and how dangerous the fumes are.
State of charge when punctured? this is major factor in Lithium batteries. Btw Please, use proper respirator when you do these tests. Fluorides released from the burning reaction can be really bad for you. There is very little test data on amounts of fluoride released but they seem to agree that it can be even lethal. if breathed directly in (very corrosive for lungs) Something interesting i did learn with Li-Ion cells, is that if you just open them, there can be next to no visible electrolyte, but if you short them internally or externally, they push electrolyte out from the inner structure. with cells i have played with, i haven't seen "running electrolyte" or slushing liquid inside the cells, also when opened, its damp but not dripping. Short-circuiting changes this quite dramatically, and there can be puddle of electrolyte suddenly, and all it needs is a spark to have a fire ball. Important factor here however is that this cell if was fully loaded, behaved very mildly, and if it had only very low state of charge, then this tells very little.
since this was just one particular element of the chemistry that burned, does that mean that different makes of batteries might not actually burn? although, if you can put out the fire it's a risk that can be mitigated
Thanks for the vid, hope this will convince some idiots claiming that lfp can’t ignite. Yes those are far less capricious than cobalts, but lto are only truly safe ones (and expensive as hell)
I think the gasses only ignited because when I sent the spike through it the second time, it cased some level of internal shorting that made a spark that ignited the electrolyte that was being vaporized.
Interesting, other tests had nothing happen but gas release like it did at first. Sure looks a heck of a lot less violent than NMC/NCA though. And like you said, much easier to extinguish.
At first the vent on top was working like it should. After another jab in the side did the trick on getting the fire going. I'm wondering when you clamp these cells together that over time the rubbing action of expansion and contraction and just general vibration will rub through the blue plastic exterior and short out the batteries?
The aluminum case is not permanently bonded to positive or negative. The only difference in potential is through the electrolyte that is internally contacting the aluminum case.
I'm curious regarding the chemical reaction of that fire and whether it's about the battery chemistry alone or if it requires atmospheric oxygen, too. Would it react the same way in a vacuum or a relatively airtight enclosure, i.e. with limited oxygen supply? Does installing the battery e.g. in an airtight metal box (with overpressure release valve) reduce the fire hazard?
He says in the comments the electrolyte contains perchlorate and organic solvent. Perchlorate is a strong oxidizer and will provide its own ‘oxygen’ for combustion. So yes it will burn once a spark or it reaches its critical auto ignition temperature (which is significantly higher than in other lithium battery chemistries). Glowing red hot that we saw after the initial stab is 500C+, so high enough for auto ignition. The combustion products (smoke) do need to exit the combustion site, or they tend to self-smother the fire. The second puncture hole gave a route to flush these out, hence the fire got way more intense. But as he states, it’s unlikely in practice a second separate puncture event would happen in a real life accident.
@@kdkd693 No. The second hole simply provided air (20% oxygen) to feed the flames. Plenty of info on how fire "works" to be found elsewhere online. Your suggestion was rubbish so kindly don't do it again. This video was hardly conducted under controlled conditions and released goodness only knows what gases into the atmos'. In UK this sort of silly experiment would be condemned on the grounds of atmospheric pollution. However, the clip did display that the item was not proof against "careless rough handling" ... exactly like almost anything else in the electronics dept'. The result we all saw for ourselves. Ergo LiFePo4 can burn if damaged, so, although it was a very poorly constructed and conducted experiment (no PPE or fire suppression bottle or even any sort of decontamination kit come to that) the result was that the cells could and did burn. And of course if a battery was in an unsuitable (flammable) location then you wouldn't need a lot of imagination to see what happens next. All in all ...3/10.
@@kdkd693 I should jolly well hope so indeed. More information ... on anything ... online than you can imagine. If you don't care to read up on the research papers published by battery users, eg Ford, say, then simply search YT. If there's something that can be done by people then YT will have a clip available somewhere. And some of the video clip stuff people post on YT is jaw dropping with regard to their personal safety, that of others and the environment/atmosphere. Punching holes in a lithium battery of any chemistry to "see what happens" is not very sensible.
Had you not hit it a second time, it would not have caught fire. The vapour being released from inside was too concentrated to actually be flammable. Outside the vapour mixed with oxygen and diluted the vapour enough to become flammable. The red hot metal would have stayed inside and only vented off. Because you hit it again, it caused a pressure shock that sent particles of red hot metal out of the vent hole into an environment where the mixture of vapour and oxygen were volatile.
I live in desert and use my 767 generator when I travel. I’ve been worried about temperature in vehicle setting it off. It’s winter now, but summer will be here soon
Nice. I'm trying to get into PEVs, but seeing Li-Ion fire videos makes me a bit paranoid, like I would not want to keep a big Li-Ion battery at home or in the office (say, if I commute to work using a PEV, and would like to charge it at work, potentially unsupervised). This on the other hand looks... ok, still bad, but in comparison much more manageable. Not 'run for your life, let your house burn' bad, but 'grab a fire extinguisher, we've got this' bad.
Interesting, nice test. 👍 LiFePO4 =| LiFePO4 apparently. The inflammability depends on the used electrolyte, because in other test the LiFePO4 cells doesn't ignite. Again, very interesting. 😊
Now I know to be more careful with them. Hoping I don't accidentally drop one and puncture falling from my work bench. Will use welding gloves and pliers for sure. Was good info to know. Thank you
All batteries are dangerous when catastrophically destroyed this way. No explosion here. A bank of AGM off-gassing hydrogen would be much more likely to kill you outright in the blast. I'll take lifepo4 any day.
Everybody is so concerned that the case will flow electricity if the blue cover is compromised. You conclude it did not. Seems no additional isolation material between cells in a pack seems necessary.
It's the lithium that is the issue puntchturing the battery is shorting the cells causing them to overheat, the lithium will burn until it is consumed... if you put it out, it will simply reignite.
I ordered 8 cells, they came in two boxes and there was one cell in each set that is bulged. I've yet to compress them, but there's just enough swelling that the buss bars barely fit. I see that's common with the lifepo4 3.2v cells, and they still pull capacity. But it makes me curious it it swelled anymore if compressing them would be dangerous. I saw a couple of videos where smaller types have actually been pulled out and then swelled to double their size, have you thought of doing a compression video? Take a swollen cell and squeeze it to see if it pops lol.
i gave thought to these batteries.. 🤔 my feeling is i think an EMP would damage board parts. cant say about a fire or explosion? as far as a cyber attack where the charging rate to 80% gets higher causing over temp & charge.. or a major solar event during charging or use...? we WILL find out someday.
Very informative test. Did your initial shorting melt off the blue cover? Was that a fully charged (3.65v) lifepo4 cell? How many ah was it? 200 or so?
I would have been interested in seeing a deep dent on the side and another one on with deep dent on the edge or corner. Does it swell and pop the vent or flame up? I know what happens when you shoot a charged lithium polymer with a .22 …… fireworks. Much worse than that LiFePO4.
0:31 Well, the fire is because there is a thermal runaway Impact of cell chemistry, when the temperature is above 240 degrees for these types of lithium ion phosphate these will catch fire, now such sudden increase of temperature created by this vertical sharp metal rod after striking it on this battery is what causing this fire. The striking is generating temperature above 240 degrees. Another alternative maybe Lithium titanate oxide battery.
Interesting. The fire is caused by the vapors burning. I wonder what they are using, because I've never seen a LiFePO4 battery burning like that. I suspect that it is some type of alcohol burning. Alcohols burn cleanly.
it had some issues but it could keep lights or even usb outlets and routers for a week with converters!!!! those things even less qualitty have nice capacity
I really hope the solid state and sodium ion batteries get combined as on viable technology. That can both can be made at scale without the bottleneck of lithium supply and these truly can't catch fire, even in car crash conditions because there is nothing flammable in it. If this was invented and implemented as the sole way of powering cars, this would make the problem of some car crash victims getting trapped in a car and burning to death if the firefighters can't get them out in time, to be a thing of the past. This is a problem that should have been solved decades ago, but sadly there has been no financial motivation for wall street to fund an effort to do so.
The battery did not catch on fire. What happened was that the second strike with the pick caused a spark. The gas that was already escaping is flammable! So the spark from the second pick strike caused the already-escaping-gas to ignite, becoming the fire we saw.
No, I don;t think you can extunguish it with a 5 gallon bucket. My chemistry is rusty, but I thought the LiFePO contained everything necessary to burn. So, they are tough to extinguish. You got that PO4 group there, so (and I might not be right on this) it seems the lithium would scavenge at least some of the PO4's oxygen, then, how noxious the combustion gasses are is TBD. I would suggest perhaps testing that. But as you say in the intro, they are a safe if you take everything into account. Risk of puncture could be minimized with a well planned installation? Good work though.
@@TheGreenHeartofItaly-fl3wv it does not contain everything to burn. There is no free oxygen, its phosphate so the oxygen is not easily released like NCA where the oxygen is bonded to cobalt and is easily broken free supporting combustion
@@HighTechLab Excellent! seriously, my chemistry is rusty, so I was speculating. The fact remains though they are difficult to extinguish. Apparently. I assumed they contained the oxidizing agent, but perhaps the reaction is more complex. I will dig into it a bit, but if you can accelerate the general understanding in this area it would be very good. Perhaps even to fire fighters with the few fires that resulted from electric car crashes.
Great video man - i bought 6 lithium ion phosphate batteries for our truck camper. i have set up storage between the camper and the truck bed. is that a safe place to store? how much gas do they give out?
[Dave] - “LiFePo4 can short if charged when below freezing. @@vroor32 - “wouldn’t a BMS stop it?” Yes, stop charging your battery if it is too cold, but that might not give you the warm & fuzzies you if you live in Canada, Finland, Sweden, Alaska, North Dakota, etc. No, the short occurs within the battery, not on the outside of the battery. Dendrites grow from one pole to the other inside the battery, kind of like stalagmites & stalactites grow inside a cave. You may see a stream going in one side of a cave, and coming out the other… kind of like battery cables attached to a battery. You may stop the flow of water outside a a cave, kind of like a BMS stops the flow of current outside a battery, but you never stop the stalagmites & stalactites from growing inside, the same way you can’t stop the dendrites from growing from the outside. Once the dendrite crosses the battery from one pole to the other, inside the battery structure, a short occurs, and a thermal runaway event will likely soon follow. The dendrites grow, as the battery ages. Charging during low temperatures only accelerate the growth. Toxic fumes are emitted with heat during a thermal runaway and you will not want to be an enclosed area (ie inside a car) during that time (ie driving on a freeway at 70 mph. When it is time to change a battery, under normal operation, it basically becomes a ticking time bomb… especially if used in an area close to the poles, where charging is done at or below freezing.
@@vroor32 - self heating batteries are good, those clearly take energy. Battery performance decreases in cold, so that can be problematic for driving. Keeping cars indoors help, so no parking & charging cars outside in the winter. A car with growing dendrites are no fun, keeping them in a garage attached to living areas, since you could magically wake up to an unexpected thermal runaway event. 😢 The days of powered & heated detached garages may be popular, in the near future.
@@SmartZero-f8e Oh yes, I mean the battery is only as safe as the charger and any sensing circuitry on the battery. but puncturing any type of battery is still not normally expected.
It's great to see these kinds of tests, keep them coming! I think the big win of LiFePO4 isn't that it doesn't burn - clearly it does, it's that it doesn't erupt violently into a gigantic ball of fire like lithium cobalt/manganese does. Looking forward to the overcharge testing!
Thank you! Coming soon!
In normal use case like the battery is overcharged or overdischarged or short circuited i believe it won't catch fire like this. Crushing the battery can only happen if like u have an earthquake and your home collapses but then u have more things to worry about than just a fire 😂.
Exactly - a bunch of 18650s would react more violently. Sure, this will still burn your house down lol but it doesn't seem like it would be as intense as e.g. those Tesla fires, given you had an equivalent amount of these batteries
Yeah, this huge cell would have become a massive firestorm if it was li-ion. Lifepo4 on the other hand seems pretty docile and doesn't really react much even to extreme abuse.
@@KuntalGhosh Lithium are used in RV vehicles that can easily be in an accident causing a puncture.
Great test & interesting results. I saw a YT guy accidentally bumped his lab power supply dial up a bit after setting up 16 brand new 280A EVE cells for their final top balance of 3.65v when something fell over & bumped it up to 4.6v for the next few days until he returned to find them all looking like footballs.
So he decided to use them and see how they go and after a year of pretty heavy use & abuse he managed to squish them back slowly to a reasonable size and shape, he did tests to see how much life was left in them and he still got 255 amps total from these highly abused batteries & only lost 20-30 amps. I thought that was pretty amazing & a credit to there output ability all things considered.
I'm impressed with how puncture-resistant the cell was. Took one hell of a wallop with a very pointy, very heavy crowbar to cause enough damage to puncture it. Thanks for doing this test! I'm not discouraged by the result; I'm still going to install a house battery bank on my cruising sailboat of 4 x 280 Ah Eve cells.
Awesome! It was a good test to do considering this cell had damage terminals and nothing else wrong with it. Now we all know and can plan our systems out to be safer as a result
I have punctured LiPO batteries which are very different many times. I have noticed that leaving the cells shorted with something metallic it makes it worse. If you would have removed the tool it might not have caught fire at all. I feel like leaving the cells shorted allows the current to create more heat than just a plain puncture.
Now that, is interesting
You should open up the aluminum casing and see if all the cells caught on fire. I bet the reason it caught on fire was not a second short from the second piercing but from the impact of the second piercing forcing the air inside the case to blow out the hole from the first piercing. Like blowing air on a smoldering ember. It increased the temperature high enough to ignite the electrolyte.
That is one cell.
I'm happy to see that they don't explode, and with a proper temperature monitoring system in place I believe something like this could be taken care of quickly if it happened in a home storage Solution. BUT this is one of the reasons I am building a mini power station outside ( like a 5x4) little building outside, because you never know if your going to be out of town, I rather lose all my equipment if need be, than my house, maybe a little over paranoid, but it is what it is lol. Great Video, seeing things like this helps the community a lot!
Better to be paranoid than homeless
I doubt that you could control it . The output of toxic gas in any confined area would drive you away from doing anything unless you had a proper breathing mask and air tank . Also lithium battery fires are very hard to put out . Tesla cars can burn for days . A test like this in the open air of a small battery is nothing like what would happen in a confined area like a camper with a bank of much larger batteries that will all go up and set the whole thing on fire . You are wise to build a separate battery storage area .
Glad you did the test. Volatile electrolyte chemistry is clearly another consideration when purchasing a battery, (i.e. electric car, etc.).
Now that we have options! Yep we're all learning together
The reaction they will also vary alot in the chemical composition the manufacture use apart form the main Lifepo4 as well as the battery design. I've seen lifepo4 explode and i have seen them only smoke. That's why its important to know the brands of the cells.
What's the worst you've seen? Got any links? Thanks
I was told they won´t burn, which is wrong, they burn, but using oxygen comeing from air. Which is much better then the others which provide their own oxygen, but you really cannot say that they are totally safe because they cannot burn at all. Thank you for making that clear.
Yes you are correct. what we discovered was that once the electrolyte was vaporized by the heat of the first puncture that it changed its properties a bit making it now flammable. we believe the second puncture created some small form of a spark that caused those vapors to ignite. Realistically in a real world situation the second puncture wouldn't come later on, imagine a vehicle accident where everything happens all at once
700 bucks for a battery that can burn my cabin down.hmmm
@@Mikerockinon1is someone throwing 20lb metal spears around in your cabin?
@@Rhinopkc i throw them every day in my cabin ;)
Nice test. Would have been great if you also tested how easy or hard it is to put out a LiFePo4 fire. I live in a basement and this is what scares me the most about lithium batteries.
there are types of enclosures for even more dangerous batteries.. 100 bucks for a fire fighter enclosure and will keep em warm when its cold!!!!
Just for your safety,i would were safety goggles next time you test something like this.
This is my favorite lithium puncture test video.
th-cam.com/video/07BS6QY3wI8/w-d-xo.html
Interesting test. The first hole caused venting, and severe heating of the plates... the second hole caused the venting to exit the glowing hole and the vapors passing over the red hot plates ignited the vapor.
Now we gotta wonder WHAT the electrolyte is...
Some organic CH molecule. Ethylene, propylene, something like that
@@yggdrasil9039 that is why solid electrolyte lithium batteries will be very significantly safer. (when they eventually reach maturity...)
Beyond 2040 likely. Hopefully before though.
@@adamrak7560 if the electrolyte is solid the ions are embeddee solid.
thats the reason high current capable cells will always have a fluid electrolyte. like lead acid. a flooded lead acid with lead plates hanging in the acid solution can provide high cranking amps. an lead AGM battery does so aswell because the electrolyte is soaked up in the glassmatt (AbsorbantGlassMat). but try high currents on a lead gel type and not only wouldn't it provide the amps because of the voltage sag, it would also damage the plates from deep discharge.
Soooo: solid state high current batterys are a fairytale and will about never happen.
solid battery electrolyte has the same energy level as solid water -ice-. so nuthin' at all. can't supply a pressure washer or water jet with a solid block of an element.
Many sellers on Amazon advertise 12V LiFePO4 battery packs as a replacement for lead acid gel cell alarm system backup batteries. It appears to be an extremely dangerous practice to substitute a LiFePO4 battery into the alarm system without knowing anything about the compatibility of the charging circuit (which is designed to work with lead acid batteries) with other battery chemistries such as LiFePO4.
Good point, although LiFePO4 batteries should have their own internal Battery Management System (BMS) that takes care of over voltage/current conditions. BMS are programmable, so some may have been tuned to work with lead-acid chargers. But as you said, I would hesitate to use a Lithium chemistry without doing thorough DD on legacy equipment.
It would have been interesting to see if you could extinguish it and whether it would reignite. I just bought a Bluetti and they say you can extinguish it with a regular dry chemical fire extinguisher. But they do not say if it will reignite.
Fun test :D That is pretty awesome you got the electrolyte to combust. Just don't breathe that smoke. Really nasty chemicals in there.
It was only when the second puncture was made that it went up in flames. I've seen countless batteries puncture tested, but never more than once. Did you ever find out what happened to those bigbattery cells? This is actually one of their 170ah Lishen cells.
Nasty chemicals huh? I was thinking the same when i saw him puttting the battery on the bare ground. Then that electrolyte and vapor was spilling all over the place. Am i the only one thinking this ain't cool at all? Although it looks like a desert, there a still animals around who may drink from water puddles further down the hill after rain falls. Could have used a piece of sheet metal to cover the ground or smtg. Sorry, maybe I'm too european or green to approve this.
And who are you trying to tell me what to do? And why am i misinformed? I'm just referring to the above comment which clearly states "nasty chemicals". Sorry i don't have my own channel yet so i'll leave my comments wherever i want, even if you don't approve. Really sorry pal.
And if I'm so terribly misinformed and you're the genius you probably think you are, why don't you enlighten instead of offending me? I'll give you the answer right away: because it's simple and a simple mind is what you are obviously.
Jm Tamilminnal solar energy India youtuber your sub
Late to the game, but it's clear how nicely the electrolyte burns. How do people think that solid state batteries will make anything safer other than preventing the calm bonfire of the liquid electrolyte?
you gave a very detailed description. thanks man.
great demonstration! should add if it can be put out with just water/sand .
You should try to extinguish it with water or extinguisher on it's peak of fire, to see difference between classic lithium batteries.
For what it’s worth, lead acid can also explode due to gassing hydrogen just like propane, diesel and petrol. All forms of energy storage carry a fire risk in the right conditions. What is much better than Lithium Ion is that it appears to lack the explosive run away fires. Basically, treat any form of energy storage with respect.
I have a lithium iron phosphate battery 8Ah this was very helpful to me of knowing what these batteries do without any protection. Thank you for the tip
This is the kind of experiment I was looking for online👍👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Good test, good to see. Definitely is a fire hazard, but not to the same degree as other lithium.
I guess the electrolyte can vary between manufacturers, but the cathode shouldn’t release oxygen to create a super hot self sustaining fire.
I would like to see an overcharge/discharge test. No one is going to stab their power wall with a pike.
i was planning on it
We are working on many more tests
@@FireAlert username checks out
These are used in RVs that can end in an accident puncturing the batteries. Maybe not a pike but part of the frame can crush them.
Nope, they're just gonna hit it with their car!
Not bad, I feel much battery upgrading my UPS to LiFepo4. As someone who works in the industry, LiPO and Lithium Ion in phones and power tools are much more hazardous when the flame starts, that phone your on can shoot a 4ft jet flame in your ear so, heads up
I do wonder if the higher capacity of these modern lron phosphate battery has a input to this
Would like to see the same test with a battery that is charged 70% or higher.
We need to do another test like this to test a fire surpression device, so we can do that one at 100% soc
I have been toying with changing out my dying diesel in my sailboat for an electric system as I don't use the engine except to get out of the marina and maybe an hour tops during the day. Fire on a boat is extremely bad so it is one of my concerns with electric. I would like to see an attempt to extinguish this battery as one of the things I do not like is that batteries seem to contain all the reactants necessary to burn so smothering them or cooling them doesn't extinguish them. With a diesel the automatic fire extinguishing system does work to some degree.
I would have liked to see you put it out with a proper fire extinguisher to prove it would stop the fire
The problem was your second stab, it created internal pressure because the spear was in the hole and it mostly went out the first hole pushing the fire with it. On an Internal error the flames would be contained i guess.
I dont think there is any high density battery that wont burn if badly punctured. Pr definition a battery stores energy, and you have to assume that a bad puncture will equal a full short. That energy has to go somewhere. That doesn't mean that there isnt battery chemistry that is safer than others, but thats more in terms of how likely is it to critically fail over time, wear and demanding conditions. When a failure does happen there can also be large differences in how agressively it burns, and how dangerous the fumes are.
That steam admitting from the battery is about 49% hydrogen gas.
Do you know the formula for the chemical breakdown? I’d like to know what inside is releasing the hydrogen molecules
What is the remainder?
@@markm8188 nothing that concerned me as to flammability, so I didn't make a mental note of that remainder. The hydrogen is the killer.
Any fire extinguishing test out there? I am impressed!
Great video. Consider trying to put one of these fires out with various materials - fire extinguishers, water, gasoline (just kidding about that one).
State of charge when punctured? this is major factor in Lithium batteries.
Btw Please, use proper respirator when you do these tests. Fluorides released from the burning reaction can be really bad for you.
There is very little test data on amounts of fluoride released but they seem to agree that it can be even lethal. if breathed directly in (very corrosive for lungs)
Something interesting i did learn with Li-Ion cells, is that if you just open them, there can be next to no visible electrolyte, but if you short them internally or externally, they push electrolyte out from the inner structure. with cells i have played with, i haven't seen "running electrolyte" or slushing liquid inside the cells, also when opened, its damp but not dripping.
Short-circuiting changes this quite dramatically, and there can be puddle of electrolyte suddenly, and all it needs is a spark to have a fire ball.
Important factor here however is that this cell if was fully loaded, behaved very mildly, and if it had only very low state of charge, then this tells very little.
Thank you for posting this video. I feel there is a lot of BS marketing online that claims these are immune to fire, which they clearly aren't
since this was just one particular element of the chemistry that burned, does that mean that different makes of batteries might not actually burn? although, if you can put out the fire it's a risk that can be mitigated
If you break a busbar off the cell, do they also go off?
P.S.: I would have expected safety glasses.
What gases are being given off?
Great introduction, very responsible.
Are the cells Voltage really ZERO Volt? May be the BMS shutdown so no Voltage is present at the terminal when you shorted out the output terminals
There was no BMS connected to this individual cell.
Thanks for the vid, hope this will convince some idiots claiming that lfp can’t ignite. Yes those are far less capricious than cobalts, but lto are only truly safe ones (and expensive as hell)
Love it!!!!! Cave man vs tech!!! More!!!
I think under normal use and normal failure modes it will just off gas and not self ignite like a lipo.
I think the gasses only ignited because when I sent the spike through it the second time, it cased some level of internal shorting that made a spark that ignited the electrolyte that was being vaporized.
Recent studies have also shown that lithium iron phosphate batteries have a far higher release of toxic gases as compared to NMC.
Interesting, other tests had nothing happen but gas release like it did at first. Sure looks a heck of a lot less violent than NMC/NCA though. And like you said, much easier to extinguish.
This was a big 200ah cell right?
Have you ever tested LTO cells
At first the vent on top was working like it should. After another jab in the side did the trick on getting the fire going. I'm wondering when you clamp these cells together that over time the rubbing action of expansion and contraction and just general vibration will rub through the blue plastic exterior and short out the batteries?
The aluminum case is not permanently bonded to positive or negative. The only difference in potential is through the electrolyte that is internally contacting the aluminum case.
I'm curious regarding the chemical reaction of that fire and whether it's about the battery chemistry alone or if it requires atmospheric oxygen, too. Would it react the same way in a vacuum or a relatively airtight enclosure, i.e. with limited oxygen supply? Does installing the battery e.g. in an airtight metal box (with overpressure release valve) reduce the fire hazard?
He says in the comments the electrolyte contains perchlorate and organic solvent. Perchlorate is a strong oxidizer and will provide its own ‘oxygen’ for combustion. So yes it will burn once a spark or it reaches its critical auto ignition temperature (which is significantly higher than in other lithium battery chemistries). Glowing red hot that we saw after the initial stab is 500C+, so high enough for auto ignition. The combustion products (smoke) do need to exit the combustion site, or they tend to self-smother the fire. The second puncture hole gave a route to flush these out, hence the fire got way more intense. But as he states, it’s unlikely in practice a second separate puncture event would happen in a real life accident.
@@kdkd693
No. The second hole simply provided air (20% oxygen) to feed the flames.
Plenty of info on how fire "works" to be found elsewhere online. Your suggestion was rubbish so kindly don't do it again.
This video was hardly conducted under controlled conditions and released goodness only knows what gases into the atmos'.
In UK this sort of silly experiment would be condemned on the grounds of atmospheric pollution.
However, the clip did display that the item was not proof against "careless rough handling" ... exactly like almost anything else in the electronics dept'.
The result we all saw for ourselves.
Ergo LiFePo4 can burn if damaged, so, although it was a very poorly constructed and conducted experiment (no PPE or fire suppression bottle or even any sort of decontamination kit come to that) the result was that the cells could and did burn.
And of course if a battery was in an unsuitable (flammable) location then you wouldn't need a lot of imagination to see what happens next.
All in all ...3/10.
@@t1n4444 thanks for your kind words….
@@kdkd693
I should jolly well hope so indeed.
More information ... on anything ... online than you can imagine.
If you don't care to read up on the research papers published by battery users, eg Ford, say, then simply search YT.
If there's something that can be done by people then YT will have a clip available somewhere.
And some of the video clip stuff people post on YT is jaw dropping with regard to their personal safety, that of others and the environment/atmosphere.
Punching holes in a lithium battery of any chemistry to "see what happens" is not very sensible.
@@t1n4444 sarcasm seems to be lost on you…
Stop behaving like a sanctimonious prat, a term you English seem to comprehend
Had you not hit it a second time, it would not have caught fire. The vapour being released from inside was too concentrated to actually be flammable. Outside the vapour mixed with oxygen and diluted the vapour enough to become flammable. The red hot metal would have stayed inside and only vented off. Because you hit it again, it caused a pressure shock that sent particles of red hot metal out of the vent hole into an environment where the mixture of vapour and oxygen were volatile.
I live in desert and use my 767 generator when I travel. I’ve been worried about temperature in vehicle setting it off. It’s winter now, but summer will be here soon
Nice. I'm trying to get into PEVs, but seeing Li-Ion fire videos makes me a bit paranoid, like I would not want to keep a big Li-Ion battery at home or in the office (say, if I commute to work using a PEV, and would like to charge it at work, potentially unsupervised). This on the other hand looks... ok, still bad, but in comparison much more manageable. Not 'run for your life, let your house burn' bad, but 'grab a fire extinguisher, we've got this' bad.
Why did you pre-discharge the battery before stabbing it??
It was at about 30% state of charge.
@@HighTechLab I wonder what would have happened if battery had been at 100% charge
We need to do one more experiment to test a fire suppression device, so we can do full SOC for hat.
@@HighTechLab Oh man, that's disappointing to hear. Why didn't you stab it at a 100% charge when it's storing the most amount of energy...?
@@HighTechLab That'd be awesome
Very well demonstrated!👍 Sehr gut demonstriert!
Interesting, nice test. 👍 LiFePO4 =| LiFePO4 apparently. The inflammability depends on the used electrolyte, because in other test the LiFePO4 cells doesn't ignite. Again, very interesting. 😊
Now I know to be more careful with them. Hoping I don't accidentally drop one and puncture falling from my work bench. Will use welding gloves and pliers for sure. Was good info to know. Thank you
you never made the video showing an overcharge condition?
That test show me how danger the batteries are. I will go with AGM for now.
All batteries are dangerous when catastrophically destroyed this way. No explosion here. A bank of AGM off-gassing hydrogen would be much more likely to kill you outright in the blast. I'll take lifepo4 any day.
It would be useful to try the same experiment using LTO cells
Everybody is so concerned that the case will flow electricity if the blue cover is compromised. You conclude it did not. Seems no additional isolation material between cells in a pack seems necessary.
I feel sorry for the grass and little bugs killed by that burning battery . RIP ...
do they react violently to trying to put out with water like the other lith batteries do?
It's the lithium that is the issue puntchturing the battery is shorting the cells causing them to overheat, the lithium will burn until it is consumed... if you put it out, it will simply reignite.
Also take care... there is a very real danger of explosion here
I ordered 8 cells, they came in two boxes and there was one cell in each set that is bulged. I've yet to compress them, but there's just enough swelling that the buss bars barely fit. I see that's common with the lifepo4 3.2v cells, and they still pull capacity. But it makes me curious it it swelled anymore if compressing them would be dangerous.
I saw a couple of videos where smaller types have actually been pulled out and then swelled to double their size, have you thought of doing a compression video? Take a swollen cell and squeeze it to see if it pops lol.
Swelling is fine and normal unless it's an unevern obvious bulge in one spot. The cells expand and contract with heat and charge
What about dents in the casing of Lifepo4 cells are they still safe to use do u have a video on dented cells ?
Big thing is they dont turn into a torch that would cause thermal runaway to the adjacent batteries
Very helpful, thank you!
Awesome video but would like to know how to put out the fire and deal with a battery on fire?
CO2. Breathe on it
I just preformed this test on all my batteries. Now they won't take a charge....
keep buying them till you find one that does
Yeah, those Chinese batteries.....
A petrol-driven car can catch fire too. Compared with what I have seen when other Lithium batteries catch fire, this looks pretty benign.
i gave thought to these batteries.. 🤔 my feeling is i think an EMP would damage board parts. cant say about a fire or explosion? as far as a cyber attack where the charging rate to 80% gets higher causing over temp & charge.. or a major solar event during charging or use...? we WILL find out someday.
Very informative test. Did your initial shorting melt off the blue cover? Was that a fully charged (3.65v) lifepo4 cell? How many ah was it? 200 or so?
I would have been interested in seeing a deep dent on the side and another one on with deep dent on the edge or corner. Does it swell and pop the vent or flame up? I know what happens when you shoot a charged lithium polymer with a .22 …… fireworks. Much worse than that LiFePO4.
Interesting that shortening does not do much but puncturing creates a fire. In most cases shortening is probably the biggest risk though.
Very good test Bro
0:31 Well, the fire is because there is a thermal runaway Impact of cell chemistry, when the temperature is above 240 degrees for these types of lithium ion phosphate these will catch fire, now such sudden increase of temperature created by this vertical sharp metal rod after striking it on this battery is what causing this fire. The striking is generating temperature above 240 degrees. Another alternative maybe Lithium titanate oxide battery.
Interesting. The fire is caused by the vapors burning. I wonder what they are using, because I've never seen a LiFePO4 battery burning like that. I suspect that it is some type of alcohol burning. Alcohols burn cleanly.
Can we get an overcharge test like this one? thanks!
When are you going to do an overcharge test?
Within the next few weeks
@@HighTechLab Would love to see that video. I couldn't find it?
So basically if you short a battery that’s bad ,
Who knew?
it had some issues but it could keep lights or even usb outlets and routers for a week with converters!!!! those things even less qualitty have nice capacity
I really hope the solid state and sodium ion batteries get combined as on viable technology. That can both can be made at scale without the bottleneck of lithium supply and these truly can't catch fire, even in car crash conditions because there is nothing flammable in it. If this was invented and implemented as the sole way of powering cars, this would make the problem of some car crash victims getting trapped in a car and burning to death if the firefighters can't get them out in time, to be a thing of the past. This is a problem that should have been solved decades ago, but sadly there has been no financial motivation for wall street to fund an effort to do so.
dude where was your safety gears?
How much copper is produced in this battery 3.2v 80ah
The battery did not catch on fire. What happened was that the second strike with the pick caused a spark. The gas that was already escaping is flammable! So the spark from the second pick strike caused the already-escaping-gas to ignite, becoming the fire we saw.
causing the battery to catch on fire
I won't be puncturing my batteries, but overall is LiFePo4 more resistance to overcharging or overdischarging leading to explosions?
Over discharging won’t cause any runaway reaction. Over charging without a bms can cause electrolyte venting.
No, I don;t think you can extunguish it with a 5 gallon bucket. My chemistry is rusty, but I thought the LiFePO contained everything necessary to burn. So, they are tough to extinguish. You got that PO4 group there, so (and I might not be right on this) it seems the lithium would scavenge at least some of the PO4's oxygen, then, how noxious the combustion gasses are is TBD. I would suggest perhaps testing that.
But as you say in the intro, they are a safe if you take everything into account. Risk of puncture could be minimized with a well planned installation? Good work though.
@@TheGreenHeartofItaly-fl3wv it does not contain everything to burn. There is no free oxygen, its phosphate so the oxygen is not easily released like NCA where the oxygen is bonded to cobalt and is easily broken free supporting combustion
@@HighTechLab Excellent! seriously, my chemistry is rusty, so I was speculating. The fact remains though they are difficult to extinguish. Apparently. I assumed they contained the oxidizing agent, but perhaps the reaction is more complex. I will dig into it a bit, but if you can accelerate the general understanding in this area it would be very good. Perhaps even to fire fighters with the few fires that resulted from electric car crashes.
Great video man - i bought 6 lithium ion phosphate batteries for our truck camper. i have set up storage between the camper and the truck bed. is that a safe place to store? how much gas do they give out?
Depends on your locality. LiFePo4 can short if charged when below freezing.
@@DavidHalko but wouldn't the BMS step in and stop the charging?
[Dave] - “LiFePo4 can short if charged when below freezing.
@@vroor32 - “wouldn’t a BMS stop it?”
Yes, stop charging your battery if it is too cold, but that might not give you the warm & fuzzies you if you live in Canada, Finland, Sweden, Alaska, North Dakota, etc.
No, the short occurs within the battery, not on the outside of the battery.
Dendrites grow from one pole to the other inside the battery, kind of like stalagmites & stalactites grow inside a cave. You may see a stream going in one side of a cave, and coming out the other… kind of like battery cables attached to a battery. You may stop the flow of water outside a a cave, kind of like a BMS stops the flow of current outside a battery, but you never stop the stalagmites & stalactites from growing inside, the same way you can’t stop the dendrites from growing from the outside.
Once the dendrite crosses the battery from one pole to the other, inside the battery structure, a short occurs, and a thermal runaway event will likely soon follow.
The dendrites grow, as the battery ages. Charging during low temperatures only accelerate the growth.
Toxic fumes are emitted with heat during a thermal runaway and you will not want to be an enclosed area (ie inside a car) during that time (ie driving on a freeway at 70 mph.
When it is time to change a battery, under normal operation, it basically becomes a ticking time bomb… especially if used in an area close to the poles, where charging is done at or below freezing.
@@DavidHalko ooofff!!
So what to do?? Buy self-heating LiFePo4 battery (keep outside vehicle) or get bluetti style battery and pay more money??
🤔
@@vroor32 - self heating batteries are good, those clearly take energy.
Battery performance decreases in cold, so that can be problematic for driving.
Keeping cars indoors help, so no parking & charging cars outside in the winter.
A car with growing dendrites are no fun, keeping them in a garage attached to living areas, since you could magically wake up to an unexpected thermal runaway event. 😢
The days of powered & heated detached garages may be popular, in the near future.
weird chemistry ,very powerful and light weight , I'm impressed .awesome technology
You should get in contact with that Demolition Ranch guy. I'd like to see what a .50 BMG would do to this
Anything other than a hole?
I have a 48v 75ah battery, can I use its 48v BMS in 12.8volt ? Is it possible?
Theres fire but Li-ion spits fire like a jet engine. Remarkable how far battery technology has come
Excellent test vid. Shows what it takes to make a relatively safe chemistry fail.
Thank you!
The main point here is that the Lithium is NOT on fire. No surprise that you got those electrolytes to burn, not concerning at all.
I know this is off topic and all but- What phone/camera was used for this? Dynamic range is killer!
iPhone 12 Pro Max
Under normal use are they safer? I mean harpooning them is not normal usage😆
Gaz UK.
No. They can explode as well! It just takes longer until they explode. It takes longer to overcharge a LifePo4-battery!
@@SmartZero-f8e Oh yes, I mean the battery is only as safe as the charger and any sensing circuitry on the battery. but puncturing any type of battery is still not normally expected.
thanks for doing this. ya I thought they didn't catch fire too. But like you said they are still much safer then the other chemistries
se supone que nunca pinches tu bateria, pero lo real es que en un accidente a 80 km por hora en un scooter no estallara, no esta claro todavia
That's a very useful test.