5th year of living dangerously with LiFePo4 batteries

On 06/04/2018 09:59 AM, jfitch wrote:
On Monday, June 4, 2018 at 6:55:55 AM UTC-7, krasw wrote:
On Monday, 4 June 2018 02:01:18 UTC+3, jfitch wrote:
On Sunday, June 3, 2018 at 8:29:08 AM UTC-7, Richard Pfiffner wrote:
On Sunday, June 3, 2018 at 8:18:49 AM UTC-7, Nick Kennedy wrote:
So is the problem of a fire caused by a dead short across the battery terminals?
Shouldn't a inline fuse coming off the positive terminal take care of any fire problem? I realize a wrench or something like it placed across the terminals would cause a massive short and possible fire, but lacking that, whats the problem?
Do these things spontaneously combust? I have two in my ship and want to know.

I shorted two different batteries, by placing upside down on a metal plate.

The LiFEPO4 was a non event. The battery management shut down immediately.

On the other hand the Lead Acid got quite hot melted the case.

Richard

There you go bringing real data into the discussion again.

I would like krasw to elaborate on the event, if he knows more. Anything that stores energy is potentially dangerous. The devil is in the details.

So far I have no other info, battery was smoking after removed from the glider. Was it LFP cells or BMS electronics, I don't know.

Keeping sco so far we have one FAA documented fire due to an SLA battery leading to the loss of the aircraft, against a rumor of a smoking battery that may or may not have been LFP which was removed from the glider on landing without damage to it. Other lithium chemistries are irrelevant, unless you are using those in your glider (such as the FES).


Wow! Did you read a different report than I did? What I saw was from
the NTSB (the folks who do the investigations), it used the term "gell
cell" instead of SLA, and most importantly it assigned no blame to the
battery. It said there was enough fire damage that they couldn't
determine if there was arcing on the terminals. They did find signs of
arcing on the wiring. That's quite a jump to calling it a "fire due to
an SLA battery", isn't it?

Apparently a "rumor" is something you don't want to believe, and a
"fact" is something you do.