Researchers Create A Lithium-Ion Battery With Built-In Flame Retardant (engadget.com) 71
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:
One big problem with lithium-ion batteries is that they have the tendency to catch fire and blow up all kinds of gadgets like toys and phones. To solve that issue, a group of researchers from Stanford University created lithium-ion batteries with built-in fire extinguishers. They added a component called "triphenyl phosphate" to the plastic fibers of the part that keeps negative and positive electrodes separate. Triphenyl phosphate is a compound commonly used as a flame retardant for various electronics. If the battery's temperature reaches 150 degrees Celsius, the plastic fibers melt and release the chemical. Based on the researchers' tests, the method can stop batteries from burning up within 0.4 seconds.
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Seems to me to be an admission of an ultimate fail.
So we should just remove seat belts and air bags from cars? Get rid of GFCI/AFCI outlets? Remove every other safety measure we've implemented?
The world is full of dangers. You can either choose to mitigate your risk, or not. The potential for a problem is there either way.
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Why don't cars have Fire Extinguishers in the engine compartment and new the fuel tank?
Lini batteries (Score:5, Funny)
It gives the impression that the more dangerous the battery is, the more it stores, at a point i wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a lithium-Nitroglycerin battery that outperforms everything else.
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An antimatter Lithium battery would store a huge ampint of energy
Re:Lini batteries (Score:5, Funny)
And I suing Duncan-Heinz, that box of yellow cake I bought didn't have any fissile materials in it at all!
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Still need to work out a few problems with the Plutonium-Lithium battery I'm developing. Those pesky laws about who can buy the raw materials is making development difficult.
Psst! Wanna buy some uranium?
https://unitednuclear.com/ [unitednuclear.com]
Radioactive isotopes also, at bargain prices!
PS: I'm SO disappointed that United Nuclear took down their .GIF that was on their main page for years.
https://media.giphy.com/media/... [giphy.com]
Strat
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PS: I'm SO disappointed that United Nuclear took down their .GIF that was on their main page for years.
Sorry, correction.
Ack! They still have the .gif on the main page, but it's tiny since they changed the page payout, and one must scroll down to see it. It used to be large and took up most of the main page!
Strat
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Still need to work out a few problems with the Plutonium-Lithium battery I'm developing. Those pesky laws about who can buy the raw materials is making development difficult. And I suing Duncan-Heinz, that box of yellow cake I bought didn't have any fissile materials in it at all!
You must be from 1984.
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It is Yellow Cake Mix...
So you have to provide some ingredients.
Also, some assembly* required.
*You may want to move your oven outdoors...
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You HAVE to read the label!
It is Yellow Cake Mix...
So you have to provide some ingredients.
Also, some assembly* required.
*You may want to move your oven outdoors...
Some kid already tried that. Apparently, "outdoors" isn't far enough. LOL
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Did Duncan Hines and KraftHeinz merge and I didn't hear about it?
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Did Duncan Hines and KraftHeinz merge and I didn't hear about it?
Psh.. yah. They switch names like every 32 hours and have a current goal of reaching a 24 hour switch-around.
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Just tell some terrorists that you will build a bomb for them. (Sorry to the few people who haven't seen Back To The Future!)
Where do I go to find a directory of them to Order Today(tm)?
Who ya gonna call? (ching...flat)
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Still need to work out a few problems with the Plutonium-Lithium battery I'm developing. Those pesky laws about who can buy the raw materials is making development difficult.
And I suing Duncan-Heinz, that box of yellow cake I bought didn't have any fissile materials in it at all!
OMG I laughed for a good 5 minutes non-stop. That's some good shit!. :D
Unfortunately, you just gave lawyers the idea for a new class-action lawsuit for the mislabeling of anything with the words "cake" and "yellow" in their name. Bye, bye sweet food; bye-bye! *waves*
LOL I'm laughing again!
Re:Lini batteries (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right the more potential energy something holds the greater potential for a dangerous failure. The real trick to making these energy sources is to arrange them in a way that they can release their energy safely under conditions that the device is expected to operate with some wiggle room for some abuse.
Sure we can out energy or current batteries with a better substance. But can we have it safe enough to operate under normal conditions?
This article isn't about allowing us to make more hazardous batteries. But just a better fail state. Because current failure conditions are rather hazardous. From the like aircraft, to hover boards, to cell phones all catching on fire often due underestimating the power sources current volatility.
A safe fail. Will be annoying as many of these devices don't have replacement batteries. But at least you won't get injured from them.
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Devices with replaceable batteries, but without this material, will simply burn until the device is ruined anyway.
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You are right the more potential energy something holds the greater potential for a dangerous failure. The real trick to making these energy sources is to arrange them in a way that they can release their energy safely under conditions that the device is expected to operate with some wiggle room for some abuse.
Sure we can out energy or current batteries with a better substance. But can we have it safe enough to operate under normal conditions?
This article isn't about allowing us to make more hazardous batteries. But just a better fail state. Because current failure conditions are rather hazardous. From the like aircraft, to hover boards, to cell phones all catching on fire often due underestimating the power sources current volatility.
A safe fail. Will be annoying as many of these devices don't have replacement batteries. But at least you won't get injured from them.
You mean like the rest of the "safety measures" the U.S. puts into place on products after "accidents" occur? All forms of batteries will be outlawed in 10...9..8...7...
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Re: Lini batteries (Score:2)
Outlawed in 1989.
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Re: Lini batteries (Score:2)
Humor.
Danger vs energy density (Score:2)
It gives the impression that the more dangerous the battery is, the more it stores
That is actually true in a sense. Greater energy density equals a potentially larger kaboom if you hold all other things equal. Now obviously it's more complicated than that since there are multiple factors that go into the risk of combustion but it's not illogical to say that the more energy a battery holds the more it can potentially release. Fortunately there are other factors that are considerably more consequential in determining how dangerous a battery is.
Gasoline is quite dangerous under the right
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What makes a battery more hazardous than fuel, is having the reaction occurs at the same location as the stored energy.
With fuel, combustion chambers are very distinct and distant from storage tanks.
Car fires (Score:4, Informative)
What makes a battery more hazardous than fuel, is having the reaction occurs at the same location as the stored energy.
There are an estimated 150,000 car fires [nfpa.org] in the US every year. I don't think either of us has the data available to make an apples to apples comparison but I very much doubt that battery powered cars will prove to be meaningfully more hazardous that gasoline powered ones.
With fuel, combustion chambers are very distinct and distant from storage tanks.
Gasoline does not have to be in a combustion chamber to ignite. A hot manifold with a leaking fuel line is more than enough to set a car on fire.
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There are an estimated 150,000 car fires [nfpa.org] in the US every year. I don't think either of us has the data available to make an apples to apples comparison but I very much doubt that battery powered cars will prove to be meaningfully more hazardous that gasoline powered ones.
Gasoline does not have to be in a combustion chamber to ignite. A hot manifold with a leaking fuel line is more than enough to set a car on fire.
My point: Fuel cell batteries where; One could refill a tank of reactant and having the reactor part in a distinct area, would not need having the chemical reaction so close to the stored energy (thin layers in lithium batteries). About burning cars: If ppls with electric cars were skipping maintenance and having so much mishandling than those burning IC engine cars endured. I think consequences would be way more dramatic. Be sure as soon as Electric Cars becomes affordable to the mass, there will be enou
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This happened to me while driving.
Re:Lini batteries (Score:4, Interesting)
A battery capable of running a laptop for 10 hours is - if the energy is applied as heat, or even just sheer unrestricted electrical discharge - the same as powering 600 laptops for a minute. Or 3600 laptops for a second. Imagine the energy you need to do that - to just turn on 3600 laptops simultaneously, even for a second.
The amount of energy stored is enormous. In oil-based products it's orders of magnitude more again. Which is why a tiny little candle thing in a survival pack can cook your food, or a paraffin heater can heat a house.
The more energy you store, the greater the risk, but it does depend on how it's released. There's a reason you can't stop a house fire without hours of dampening it down - wood has a ton of energy but doesn't tend to release it that quickly, but can still be alight the next morning once it gets going.
In terms of battery, the worst problem is a short-circuit, either in the battery or the circuit itself. I can remember short-circuiting AA NiCd batteries as a kid, with my electronics kits. You could literally melt the plastic casing off the battery and make them too hot to touch in just a few seconds, with sparks and all sorts of case deformation as you did so. And that's an AA battery, with maybe 450mAh. Nowadays, rechargeable AA's can ten times that.
And then you consider the energy in a Li-Po that's as big as a laptop battery? When that goes wrong, you're in big trouble.
The short-circuit resistance does change things. Shorting a cheap alkaline likely won't do much at all, but even they come with warnings not to do that. But you're assuming that things are already going wrong for a battery in normal usage to short. At that point, you just assume zero-resistance and watch as your laptop catches fire and explodes.
No matter the technology, if it's capable of delivering that much electrical power, and you short it or break it, it's going to do pretty much the same thing.
My dad tells a story of when he and his work colleagues shorted a forklift battery bank. It was in an abandoned warehouse and the forklift was scrap, basically. They dropped a thick steel spanner over the batteries (a handful of normal lead-acid car batteries, basically) from a distance. The spanner glowed red, then bent, then glowed white, at which point the entire forklift exploded into smithereens and they were scraping battery acid off a warehouse ceiling (50ft up!) for weeks.
The energy is there, if you need to do those jobs for that length of time. If you release it all at once, even for a car battery, you have a literal explosive device on your hands. That isn't going to change just because you change lead-acid for hydrogen fuel cells or petrol for LPG or NiCd for LiPo.
What is 60 x 600? (Score:2)
A battery capable of running a laptop for 10 hours is - if the energy is applied as heat, or even just sheer unrestricted electrical discharge - the same as powering 600 laptops for a minute. Or 3600 laptops for a second. Imagine the energy you need to do that - to just turn on 3600 laptops simultaneously, even for a second.
Answer: 36,000, not 3600.
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It gives the impression that the more dangerous the battery is, the more it stores, at a point i wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a lithium-Nitroglycerin battery that outperforms everything else.
Imagine that in a Note 7.... Poof, you are gone...
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Well, it relates to two things - energy density, and how fast that energy can be extracted.
Energy density is obvious - the more energy you can store per unit volume, the more potentially dangerous it is. Since Lithium based chemistries have some of the highest densities around, well, it also goes that they are the most dangerous.
Internal resistance is also important because ti tells you how fast that energy can be released. Again, Lithium chemistries do well here. And the thing is, you want a low internal r
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Well, batteries can be recycled pretty easily so the toxic elements should only enter the environment if they leak out when activated.
Personally, I prefer a bit of leaked flame retardant over a plane crash [ibtimes.co.uk]. Plane crashes kind of suck for the environment, too.
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> batteries can be recycled pretty easily
Are they? Is there enough pressure in place for that?
> Personally, I prefer a bit of leaked flame retardant over a plane crash
Point is: less flights overall is even better. Of course my mumbling above about a "hipster blazing off his balls" was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the serious part is: at the moment we are not willing (are we even able) to renounce to a bit of "instant gratification" (also called "progress") in the name of a longer term vision. Of course
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Well, batteries can be recycled pretty easily so the toxic elements should only enter the environment if they leak out when activated.
You're a little off the mark here... The most significant environmental contamination is far far more likely going to occur where the batteries are manufactured from handling [or mishandling] of bulked raw materials and wastes. The overlook is understandable though, because electronics manufacturing and recycling operations typically occur in poorer Asian countries and people in the western world rarely take note environmental damage unless it happens in their backyard. (That's not meant as an insult, just
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Yeah, reducing a widespread fire risk can be very valuable to a society, even if there is a shift of risk to the environmental side.
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DiLithium (Score:3, Interesting)
I kind of like them as they are (Score:3)
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What's more satisfying than a model airplane that crashes AND bursts into flames?
This is how we know that real terrists are vanishingly rare. A $120 drone with some mechanism added to cause the battery to combust, let's call it $20 or less, is a serious threat to modern civilization. Well, not a drone, but multiples of them. Since we still haven't learned not to make flammable roofs, even though it is idiotic and we have alternatives, you could cause major chaos with such toys. Yet, nobody is doing this, thankfully.
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Most roofing materials don't catch fire that easily.
It just so happens that I have samples of roofing tiles and bad LiPos handy, but I hesitate to create a toxic fire even for science. Too bad I never picked up a sandblasting cabinet, that might be a good place to execute a controlled experiment. I wonder what would be an effective filter for the exhaust.
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Normal bombs and homemade explosives are suprisingly cheap, this idea would be economically infeasible.
You neglected to account for the cost of delivery.
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Doesn't even have to be that complicated. A drone trailing a few streamers of aluminum foil flown into the midst of an electrical sub-station will cause the prettiest corona arc flash episode you ever did see.
This will cause problems! (Score:3)
here's why this is stupid (Score:2)
Re:here's why this is stupid (Score:4, Informative)
No. It prevents the heat from forming in the first place by stopping the reaction that would produce it.
Tendency? (Score:2)
One big problem with lithium-ion batteries is that they have the tendency to catch fire and blow up all kinds of gadgets like toys and phones.
Tendency? I don't thin you know what that word means.
Given the number of lithium-ion batteries in the world, then number of fires and explosions is rather small, even including the well-publicized Samsung devices and Boeing 787 incident.