As consumers worldwide slowly make the switch from internal combustion vehicles to lower-carbon equivalents, a few concerns have appeared about electric vehicles. Range anxiety is ebbing away as batteries become bigger and chargers become more frequent, but a few well-publicized incidents have raised worries over fire safety.
Lithium-ion batteries can ignite in the wrong circumstances, and when they do so they are extremely difficult to extinguish. Renault has a solution, and in a rare moment for the car industry, they are sharing it freely for all manufacturers to use.
The innovation in question is their Fireman Access Port, a standardized means for a fire crew to connect up their hoses directly to the battery pack and attack the fire at its source. An opening is covered by an adhesive disk designed to protect the cells, but breaks under a jet of high-pressure water. Thermal runaway can then be halted much more easily.
The licensing terms not only allow use of the access port itself, but also require any enhancements be shared with the rest of the community of automakers using the system. This was the part which caught our interest, because even if it doesn’t come from the same place as the licences we’re used to, it sounds a lot like open source to us.
Oddly, this is not the first time Renault have open-sourced their technology, in the past they’ve shared an entire car.
Interesting that they seem to use a patent as the basis of their open source. That might be problematic: in ‘normal’ open source the basis is copyright, which applies automatically and is ”owned” by the contributor (who makes it available under the same license etc.)
Getting a patent is hard and costly work and certainly not automatic. So a contributor is not on equal footing (unless they also apply for a patent). The solutions that you develop to integrate this invention are not protected, so manufacturers will tend to do what they always do and keep their solutions secret. So the advantage over dedicating a patent (~giving it to the public domain) is that licensees can not create an excluding (patent) roadblock based on this patent.
So… it mostly benefits the original patent holder (and subsequent licensees that will also patent their derivatives). Doing open source where each iteration costs 10,000 EUR minimum is a bit far fetched if you ask me…
Patents work in a bit of an inverse from copyright/IP licensing. Inventions do not enjoy any(*) legal protection unless explicitly patented, while with creative works only the author has any rights to do anything with it unless explicit permission is given. The reason they have gone with the patent approach (my opinion) is:
1. Didn’t intend to “open-source” it originally and went through patent protections as usual
2. Patent-protecting it means they can compel anyone who makes improvements to freely share their improvements with the community, by denying the use of the original patent if you don’t agree with their terms. If the original design did not have patent protections, any improvements could then be patented by a 3rd party and Renault would have no way to prevent it.
Anyone is free to contribute even without patenting their creation, if you invent something and don’t patent it, it’s free for anyone to use
we agree on the facts about the lack of protection on inventions unless/until they are patented. A patent is a trade with the legislator: you get a monopoly on it in return for revealing your secrets that comprise the invention. So the natural defense if you do not have/wish for a patent is to keep your invention secret.
If they have some (magical) terms in their license that automatically reveals trade secrets of they users, those users would a) not enter into that deal or b) make sure all relevant trade secrets will be on a fast track to patent so at least they are on an equal footing.
Open source works because it is a good deal for all parties involved. I fear the same cannot be said for this patent-license deal, but I hope to be proven wrong.
Sure, but in an invention like this it is practically impossible to maintain a trade secret unless it involves the manufacturing process or something like that. Any particular designs etc. are obvious to their reverse-engineering departments
An open source hole? Just wait till my girlfriend hears about this!
And just like whatever open-source holes you’ve found, this one is also viral – albeit only infecting the holes, not the rest of the car like GPL would.
Sounds like GPL to me.
I’m curious if standardising the access port will actually help. I may be wrong here but isn’t runaway lithium cell flame really hot, enough to melt metal?
On a second thought, maybe the solution is indeed as simple as submerging the whole thing in water
I would have thought that if the (car) battery pack is already an inferno then getting to the port will be the least of their problems.
I see this as an “emergency isolator” that, if it looks iffy from the outside (maybe some smoke), then the first appliance to arrive on the scene can just hook-up a hose and know that that part of the car has been made-safe (much like they’d go for the fuel tank in a combustion car)… although having watched their promo-video, it seems to a) be in the top-middle (within the passenger space?) and b) for use when it is actively on fire (but only after the interior has burnt away to reveal the access port but not so late the metalwork is melting?)
“Apparatus”, not “appliance”. Close though!
See first line on wikipedia: A firefighting apparatus (North American English)[1] or firefighting appliance (UK English)[2] describes any vehicle that has been customized for use during firefighting operations.
Why put the port deep inside the car? Won’t that make it harder to connect the hose to it and thus let the runaway get much farther/hotter/bigger?
Wouldn’t an automatic system that flushes the battery with an onboard PCM suspension (salt based phase change material).
My thoughts exactly… Funny enough in their propagation video the car is already burned to ashes when the firefighter finaly gains the access to the hose port… They should put it somewhere more accessible. Idealy in a way that it can be filled from 5 meters away with strong enough water jet…
Then you go to a hand car wash that cleans your car with a pressure washer……
why not a blow off panel triggered by the airbags or a battery temperature sensor?
Indeed. How will a fire-fighter access that in a timely fashion?
And another thing: Any “port” that allows for the introduction of fire suppression material INTO the battery could conceivably allow flames and toxic gases to be vented out through the same channel.
Unless the intent is so save the estate the cost of cremation, why place (what could conceivably become) a blowtorch nozzle in the center interior of the vehicle?
This is not designed to save the car, if the battery has gone up it’s already a loss. This is designed to allows the firefighters to actually put out the battery fire without using e.g. 11,000 gallons of water, preventing damage to surrounding structures
A good argument that, unfortunately, addresses neither of my points.
The interior location is stupid, but an externally accesible one isn’t.
A hand line with a wide fog pattern as a “shield” to push back flames on approach would work, then open the cap with a long handled tool. A smooth bore nozzle aimed into said port would make short work of the “blowtorch” effect.
I don’t think it’s about saving the car. It’s about making sure the battery is fully extinguished. That way the battery doesn’t re-ignite half an hour later when everyone thought they were done.
Unfortunately that’s now how battery fires work. You have to keep pumping in water until all the chemicals have reacted away safely. Otherwise it can still keep generating hydrogen and heat – since the chemicals in the battery actually react with water – and ignite again later.
That’s why they dunk the cars in a container full of water, and keep it there for days until they’re sure the battery is completely gone.
Funny they used to teach in class you don’t want to put water on a metal fire
The one time putting water on a fire can make the fire worse, or make it blow up….
Even if you smother it, if there’s enough air and latent heat build up, may reignite, the best way would be a mix of dry extinguisher mix with a non flammable fluid that wouldn’t react to both cool and cut the oxygen supply
It depends.
Yes: water on alkali metals does cause an energetic exothermic reaction. That being said, battery packs consist of thousands of individual sealed batteries. The problem is thermal runaway — the heat from the burning cells ignites the surrounding intact cells. This compartmentalization means EV battery packs can burn for a long time.
While water will react with the damaged cells, it also removes heat. Flooding the battery pack cools it faster than heat is being produced while using up the “fuel” in the damaged cells.
Yes, when I had a Lithium Ion Battery fire I controlled it with a garden hose by basically keeping the adjacent cells cool. Damage was limited to the 1 cell that went up, and the nearby cells were blackened but otherwise undamaged.
It took a really long time for that 1 cell to stop hissing.
They’re awful in that regard. We have one scrapyard in town that will take EVs and they’ve dealt with multiple fires in the yard as a result.
Now any wrecked EV they take gets put in a concrete pit and submerged in water for at least 24 hours.
this isn’t primarily a metal fire, it’s a lithium battery electrolyte fire. You can’t smother it with anything since it contains an oxidizer and generates its own oxygen supply while burning – in fact it can keep burning under water for as long as the fire is hot enough to sustain its own reaction.
That doesn’t mean water is useless – it still happens to be one of the best options around for cooling hot things down, and cooling the battery a) stops thermal runaway from happening in parts of the battery that aren’t yet burning, and b) can bring the burning part of the battery down below autoignition temperature.
The trick is actually getting enough water right to the burning cells to cool them down, which is what this access port is designed to help with.
lithium ion batteries actually contain only a tiny amount of lithium. when they catch fire it isn’t the lithium burning, it is the hydrocarbon solvent in the electrolyte
i think the other comments did a good job on why i don’t think this is really gonna be that useful…
but i think the premise of the article is actually wrong. when it comes to lithium-ion battery cars, there has actually been a lot of conspicuous sharing of designs. and the key word there is conspicuous. i think it’s a pretty rational response to some of the problems that face the entire EV market. people are afraid of getting a car that they can’t charge when they travel, so the vendors want to be seen standing in front of cameras talking about how interoperable they are because their altruism has produced an open design for a charging port. people are afraid of EV fires so now we are seeing this PR stunt about how altruistic they are with their open design for fire management.
it doesn’t matter if it works or not, the point is to visibly do something about it. they’re countering a lot of FUD about the risks of fires. i don’t think they’re actually trying to do one single thing about fires, they just want to be seen taking the risk seriously.
personally i’d like to know more actual information about the risk. i know there’s a lot of ICE fires that never show up on the evening news, and EV fires are often dramatic and over-reported. but i’m not convinced by blase dismissals. i’d like to know how the numbers actually work out. are ICE fires really more common than EV fires?
of course it’s hard to separate out the different driver behavior…there was a famous tesla crash in coral gables in 2022 where a kid suffering from affluenza drove his gift tesla over a small hump in a neighborhood street at >80mph and caused a spectacular wreck and explosion and homicide. and that exact same crash happened a couple miles from my house a year ago. same down to it being some dumb kid who was given a ridiculous car to kill himself with. has that happened a dozen times or a thousand times? is it really more common with teslas than mustangs and mercedeses? i don’t know but it’s definitely going to be a big part of the battery fire statistics
Electric vehicles are not appropriate for rural areas because of environmental sensitivities and the fact that there is a very low probability of a suitably equipped fire crew being able to attend to a fire in a timely manner. Life knows how to deal with the byproducts of a carbon based fires, in fact life will eat your fuel if you leave it in a tank long enough. Lithium and its compounds are particularly toxic and runoff from fires can enter river systems, which in my area would eventually impact on Australia’s Great Barrier reef. Our operations are mostly “organic” for this reason, we must be mindful of the fact that our property has a protected area running for 400 meters along one boundary and that the property is a catchment for that area.
Why not just use a battery chemistry that cannot have self-sustaining thermal runaway? Isn’t it a feature of LiFePO4?