Just last week, a seven- and nineteen-year-old died in Astora from a fire the FDNY says was sparked by a battery inside a charging e-bike. New Yorkers know too well the danger and deadly consequences of these batteries. In the first two months of this year, Lithium Ion battery fires had already taken two lives and caused 40 injuries. But it is not difficult to imagine some percentage of e-bike or e-scooter batteries getting banged up or busted on busy city streets, leading to an elevated fire risk.Īccording to the NYC Mayor’s Office, batteries in e-bikes and e-scooters caused 220 fires in 2022, up from just 44 fires in 2020. It is important to emphasize, in both Quintiere’s experiment and the I-Team/Investiga demonstration, battery cells were intentionally damaged and did not catch fire on their own. “The water in the sponge starts to boil at the surface of the battery and then cools the battery and stifles the runway reaction within the battery,” Quintiere said. James Quintiere, the study’s principal researcher and a University of Maryland Fire Protection Engineering expert, said the test was successful. In 2020, the US Department of Transportation sponsored research using the puncture test to determine whether covering battery cells with a slightly wet, spongy material might suppress flames. The concept of puncturing battery cells to model what happens in a lithium ion battery fire is not new.

The city council is proposing two new bills to protect New Yorkers from fires started by lithium-ion batteries. But the battery pack was still heating up, and after about five minutes, the next battery cell popped, igniting the fire anew and, in turn, lighting nearby cardboard on fire.įrom that point on, it took less and less time for each successive battery cell to overheat and catch fire.Īround 11 minutes into the demonstration, the cascade of overheating cells led to a final explosion so violent that it broke the equipment used to hold the battery pack down. An untrained eye might have concluded the fire had fizzled out. The video demonstration also revealed why lithium ion battery fires can be so deceptive.Īfter puncturing the first battery cell in the pack, there was an initial plume of smoke in the room, but after about four minutes, the smoke had mostly cleared and there were no visible flames. “During that period of time it gives off a large amount of heat and high temperature and it’s a good source of ignition for other objects around it or in contact with it.” “Thermal runaway is that the battery goes into ignition and combustion and it keeps going in this process until it uses up all its energy,” said Neil Schultz, Executive Director of VTEC Laboratories. That heat then transfers to the next cell, and so on. Recordings of the demonstration show how compromising a single battery cell inside the pack, leads to a chain reaction called “thermal runaway.” Essentially, when one battery cell combusts, the immense heat transfers to the next cell, leading it to catch fire. Get Tri-state area news and weather forecasts to your inbox.

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